Veuillot The Liberal Illusion 1908

The Liberal
Illusion

By

Louis Veuillot

(1866)

Translated by

Rt. Rev. Msgr. George Barry O’Toole, Ph. D., S. T. D.
Professor of Philosophy in
The Catholic University of America,
Washington, D. C.

With Biographical Foreword by

Rev. Ignatius Kelly, S. T. D.,

Professor of Romance Languages in
De Sales College,

Toledo, Ohio

Of old time thou hast broken my yoke,

thou hast burst my bands, and thou
saidst: I will not serve. — Jer. 2:20.

BIOGRAPHICAL FOREWORD

A PALADIN, and not a mere fighter,” says Paul Claudel of Louis
Veuillot. “He fought, not for the pleasure of fighting, but in defense
of a holy cause, that of the Holy City and the Temple of God.”

It is just one hundred years ago, 1838, that Louis Veuillot first
dedicated himself to this holy cause. “I was at Rome,” he wrote as an old
man recalling that dedication. “At the parting of a road, I met God. He
beckoned to me, and as I hesitated to follow, He took me by the hand
and I was saved. There was nothing else; no sermons, no miracles, no
learned debates. A few recollections of my unlettered father, of my
untutored mother, of my brother and little sisters.” This was Louis
Veuillot’s conversion, the beginning of his apostolate of the pen which
was to merit him the title of “Lay Father of the Church” from Leo XIII;
“Model of them who fight for sacred causes” from Pius X; and from
Jules Le Maitre the epithet “le grand catholique.”

In the days of the Revolution, the maternal grandmother of Veuillot,
Marianne Adam, a hatchet in her hand, had defended the cross of the
church of Boynes in old Gatinais. “I do nothing more,” said Veuillot,
fifty years later. He was born in this same village of Boynes, October 13,
1813, of poor, uneducated parents. A meager elementary education,
little religious training, a schoolmaster who distributed dirty novels to
his young charges, nothing of these early years would seem to point
towards his apostolate of the future. He had reached the age of thirteen,
when Providence intervened. Thirteen years old! Time to earn his
bread! But by what work? The ambitious mother wanted him to be a
lawyer. From his almost meaningless elementary education, he had two
helpful assets, sufficient spelling skill and a better than average script.
With these recommendations, and with a word from a family friend,
Veuillot was accepted as a clerk in the office of a lawyer of Paris,
Fortune Delavigne, brother of the poet Casimir, then at the height of his
literary glory.

His first work was simple, the pay only thirty francs a month, but
there was opportunity to educate himself by his reading and his human
contacts. Later on, in the memoirs of his youth, he gave thanks to
Heaven for three blessings of his life: poverty, love of work, and an

1

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

incapacity for debauch. His free time was devoted to reading and
reading was learning; books took the place of sleep and no other
pleasure took the place of books. He thought of the priesthood and
wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Paris, Mgr. de Quelin, asking
admission to the Petit Seminaire. Perhaps this wasn’t the proper
procedure; perhaps the letter never reached its address; at any rate,
there was no reply. The Church lost a probable priest, but gained a sure
lay apostle.

The year 1831 is a turning point in his life. Eighteen years of age,
assistant chief clerk in the same office, one hundred francs a month
salary, Veuillot began to write. Some of his efforts appeared in Le
Figaro. Casimir Delavigne praised certain of his poetic attempts and he
was thus led to decide on a career in journalism. His first work was with
an humble-enough paper, but not without circulation, L’Echo de la
Seine-Inf erieure. “Without any preparation,” he says, “I became a
journalist.” He went on to other papers in the provinces, “feuilles de
chou,” as the Parisians call them, at Rouen, at Perigueux; he formed his
hand in this provincial journalism, shaped his mind, and fostered his
bent for appraising men and their ideas. His university was the wide
school of clash and contact. But, if he was writing “almost before he had
begun to study,” as Sainte-Beuve puts it, his study soon caught up with
his trade, and at the age of twenty-five Veuillot gave sign of possessing
that depth of view and breadth of culture which are almost without
exception the fruit of the university mind. Veuillot was the exception
and there was not, as too often there is in the university mind, not even
the suspicion of the snob in him.

In 1838, the year of his trip to Rome, Veuillot had scarcely anything
soundly Christian about him. His conversion was no different than he
had described it, but looking back upon it now, after one hundred years,
may we not see it as a great divine grace for Catholic France? The
apologists of the “eldest daughter of the Church” were choosing to fence
with the enemies of the Cross of Christ, whereas the Church needed, as
it always does, not a gilt-edge weapon, but a broad-sword. The
champions of ecclesiastical France were of the school of “liberal
apologists.” Veuillot returned to France, a soldier, a missionary, a zealot
if you will, but of a zeal which resembles that of a Jerome, an Augustine,
a Bernard, a Bossuet, a de Maistre. His contemporaries reproached him
for his violence, but his reply swept the ground away: “You need make
no effort to persuade me that others are more refined than I. I tremble
that others do not possess enough of what I have too vigorously ... I am
too ignorant not to be violent; but they lack red blood, hate for a society
in which they live, a society where velvet and lace cover up its sins and

ii

Biographical Foreword

its corruption. They do not know what is happening in the street; they
have never set their feet therein; but I come from it, I was born in it,
and more than that, I still live in it.” And he added, “We are willing
enough to have the blasphemers save their souls, but in the meantime,
we don’t intend to have them imperil the souls of others.”

The 16th of June, 1839, Louis Veuillot made his first contribution to
the Univers. It was just a short article, “La Chapelle des Oiseaux,” yet it
was the beginning of an association which was to continue through
forty-five years, to influence thought and action long after his time. On
February 2, 1840, he became a regular contributor and, in 1842, Editor-
in-Chief. His first editorial declaration is an exposition of his Catholic
program: “In the midst of factions of every sort, we belong only to the
Church and to our country. With justice towards all, submissive to the
laws of the Church, we reserve our homage and our love to an authority
of genuine worth, an authority which will issue from the present
anarchy and will make evident that it is of God, marching towards the
new destinies of France, with Cross in hand.”

He thought of his journalism as a “metier” to be studied, analyzed,
appraised. He knew its deficiencies, but he sensed too its genius. “The
talent of the journalist,” he wrote, “is arrow-like swiftness and, above
all, clarity. He has only a sheet of white paper and an hour to explain
the issue, defeat the adversary, state his opinion; if he says a word
which doesn’t move straight to the end, if he pens a phrase which his
reader does not understand immediately, he doesn’t appreciate his
trade. He must hurry; he must be exact; he must be simple. The pen of
the journalist has all the privileges of a racy conversation; he must use
them. But no ornaments; above all, no striving after eloquence.”

His journalism was also a mission, a vocation. He thought about it as
he knelt before the Blessed Sacrament and he determined early that he
must place his tasks above parties, above systems. “A party,” he
declared, “is a hatred; a system is a barrier; we want nothing to do with
either. We are going to take society as the apostles took it. We are
neither of Paul, nor of Cephas; we are of Jesus Christ.” The history of
his career bears out the fact that this was his invariable program.
Journalist, yes! But a crusader, an apostle as well.

His pen flashed out in defense of the freedom of Christian education.
“You will permit us to open our schools, or you will open your prisons
for us,” he wrote from the cloisters of Solesmes in a vein that
transported Montalembert into enthusiasm. In 1844, he rose to a
magnificent defense of the Abbe Combalot, condemned to prison for the
crime of lese-Universite. And he in turn, for his hardy defense, was
thrown behind the locks of the Conciergerie for three months. In 1850,

iii

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

the Social Question was agitating all of France. “Veuillot shed light
upon it from on high,” said Mgr. Roess of Strassbourg, not many years
ago. Albert de Mun could write of his social philosophy: “All of Catholic
social Action is contained in his words of fire.”

But his social Catholicism was more than a doctrine. It was his very
life. “To think that men are my brothers!” he used to ponder. There is
beautiful Christian counsel in the letter he addressed to his wife, who
was just hiring a new servant: “Make it easy for her to obey, in forcing
yourself to possess the virtue of command, which is a virtue of justice,
of meekness and of patience. . . . And when you find yourself poorly
served, try, before you complain, to realize how you yourself serve God.
Then surely your reproaches will be milder and will not wound. It would
be a grand thing for us, and for all who are in authority over others, if in
our relations with our charges, we should simply be good Christians, if
we should simply rid ourselves of the sentiment of our own importance,
which makes us proud, imperious, bitter and dissatisfied, as soon as
people fail to render us what we think they should.” And he himself
practiced this virtue, meekness without weakness, patience without
weariness. Those who were close to him, who were associated with him,
could not but love him. Son, brother, husband, father, friend, his
affections were diversified and enduring. There was in him, says
Fortunat Strowski, “le fremissement de la tendresse humaine.”

He was the champion in France of the declaration of the Dogma of
Papal Infallibility. His ardor and enthusiasm brought him into conflict
with certain members of the hierarchy. Mgr. Dupanloup denounced him
vigorously, but the wound was assuaged by Pius IX in a special
audience, when the venerable Pontiff assured him that “le cher Univers”
had been splendid in this affair, as in every other.

After the war of 1870, Veuillot resumed his apostolate for Church and
country. It was under an un-Christian, an un-French leadership that
France was marching, and Veuillot was indignant: “I, a Christian,” he
cried out, “a Catholic Christian of France, as old in France as its oaks
and venerable as they; I, the son of perspiration moistening vine and
grain, son of a race which has never ceased giving to France tillers of the
soil, soldiers and priests, asking nothing in return but work, the
Eucharist and rest in the shadow of the Cross; ... I am made, unmade,
governed, ruled, slashed at by vagabonds of mind and morals, men who
are neither Christian nor Catholics, and by that very fact, who are not
French and who can have no love of France.” “Happy are the dead,” his
pen trembled as he wrote the words in 1872, but his faith and courage
did not falter long, and the last years of his life found him still the
ardent champion of sacred causes. For nearly half a century, he had

IV

Biographical Foreword

been fighting for the holy city and the temple. He was worn out by the
unceasing combat; his pen moved slowly and finally not at all. His hand
could hold only the rosary which had been his companion of the years,
he told its beads constantly until the end, which came quietly, calmly
April 7, 1883. “Since then,” said M. Barthou a few years ago, “his
reputation has not ceased to grow. Rather, we may say of him with his
biographer, Frangois Veuillot: “He continues to radiate,” for Louis
Veuillot is a flame of truth and devotion, unquenchable because kindled
by the divine spark of faith and love for God and country.

Ignatius Kelly, S. T. D.

De Sales College
Feast of the Nativity
December 25, 1938.

V

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

IN selecting for translation Louis Veuillot’s L’illusion liberate, the
translator has been guided by what seems to him a great need of our
time — a clear refutation of the fallacious slogans of recently
resurgent Liberalism.

Rousseauan liberalism was the parent error that spawned Marxian
socialism, though it was prone at first to disown and repudiate this
disreputable offspring. To-day, however, we see parent and child united
in the close, if temporary, alliance of the Popular Front, in which both
lay equally unwarranted claims to the much-coveted name of
democracy.

Neither of these political ideologies is in harmony with Catholic faith.
But while most American Catholics are fully aware that Marxian
socialism has been branded with severe condemnation in the encyclical
letters of Leo XIII and Pius XI, comparatively few of them are aware
that in his Encyclical Libertas praestantissimurn naturae opus
(“Liberty, the highest gift of nature”) of May 20, 1888, Pope Leo XIII
expressly condemned the equally detestable social doctrine known as
Liberalism.

In short, this Encyclical of Leo XIII on Liberalism placed the seal of
papal approval as fully upon the contents of Louis Veuillot’s The Liberal
Illusion as did the same Pontiffs Encyclicals on the Condition of Labor
and Christian Democracy upon the Christian social ethics expounded in
Bishop von Ketteler’s The Labor Question and Christianity.

Pope Leo XIII’s Teaching on the Subject of Liberalism

That no Catholic may be an adherent of the French Revolutionary
principles collectively known as Liberalism is made clear in almost
every line of the encyclical Liberty, the highest gift of nature, excerpts
from which we quote below:

If when men discussed the question of liberty, they only
grasped its true meaning, such as We have now delineated it,
they would never venture to fasten such a calumny on the
Church as to assert that she is the foe of individual and public

vi

Translator’s Preface

liberty. . . . But there are many who follow in the footsteps of
Lucifer, and adopt as their own his rebellious cry, “I will not
serve;” and consequently substitute for true liberty what is
sheer license. Such, for instance, are the men, belonging to that
widely-spread and powerful organization, who, usurping the
name of liberty, style themselves liberals . . . these followers of
liberalism deny the existence of any Divine authority to which
obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is a law unto
himself; whence arises the ethical system which they style
independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty,
exempts man from any obedience to the commands of God, and
substitutes a boundless license. . . . The end of all this it is not
difficult to foresee. For once granted that man is firmly
persuaded of his own supremacy, it follows that the efficient
cause of the unity of civil society is to be sought, not in any
principle exterior or superior to man, but simply in the free will
of individuals; that the power of the State is from the people
only; and that, just as every man’s individual reason is his only
rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be
the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs.
Hence the doctrine of the supremacy of the majority, and that
the majority is the source of all law and all authority. . . . But
. . . a doctrine of this nature is most hurtful both to individuals
and to the State. For once ascribe to human reason the only
authority to decide what is true, and what is good, and the real
distinction between good and evil is destroyed; honor and
dishonor become a matter of private opinion; pleasure is the
measure of what is lawful; and given a code of morality which
can have little or no power to restrain the unruly propensities of
man, a way is then open to universal corruption. To turn to
public affairs: authority is severed from the true and natural
principle whence it derives all its efficacy for the common good;
and the law determining right and wrong is at the mercy of a
majority — which leads by the most direct route to downright
tyranny. The empire of God over man and civil society once
repudiated, it follows that religion, as a public institution,
ceases to exist, and with it everything that belongs to religion.

There are indeed, some adherents of liberalism who do not
subscribe to those opinions, which we have seen to be so fearful
in their enormity, and tending to produce the most terrible
evils. Indeed many, compelled by the force of truth, do not
hesitate to admit that such liberty is vicious and simple license
. . . and therefore they would have liberty ruled and directed by
right reason, and consequently subject to the natural law and to
the Divine eternal law. And here they think they may stop, and

vii

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

hold that no man is bound by any law of God, except such as
can be known by natural reason. — In this they are plainly
inconsistent ... if the human mind be so presumptuous as to
define what are God’s rights and its own duties, its reverence
for the Divine law will be apparent rather than real, and its own
judgment will prevail over the authority and providence of God.

There are others, somewhat more moderate though not more
consistent, who affirm that the morality of individuals is to be
guided by the Divine Law, but not the morality of the State, so
that in public affairs the commands of God may be passed over,
and may be disregarded. Hence the fatal theory of the
separation of Church and State . . . ; whereas on the contrary, it
is clear that the two powers, though dissimilar in function and
unequal in rank, ought nevertheless to live in concord, by the
harmony of their actions and the fulfillment of their duties.

But this maxim is understood in two ways. . . . Many wish
the State to be separated from the Church wholly and entirely,
so that in every right of human society, in institutions, customs
and laws, in the offices of State, and in the education of youth,
they would pay no more regard to the Church than if it did not
exist; and, at most, would allow the citizens to attend to their
religion in private if they pleased ... it is absurd that the citizen
should respect the Church but the State despise it.

Others do not oppose the existence of the Church . . . yet rob
her of the nature and right of a perfect society; and hold that it
does not belong to her to legislate, to judge, to punish, but only
to exhort, to advise and to rule her subjects according to their
consent. But their opinion would pervert the nature of this
Divine society . . . ; and at the same time they would aggrandize
the power of the civil government to such an extent as to subject
the Church of God to the empire and sway of the State.

Common to all these shades of liberal thought is the principle of the
State’s indifference to any form of religion, whether true or false. Pope
Leo XIII tells us that this can be justified only on the supposition “that
the State has no duties towards God, or that such duties, if they exist,
may be abandoned with impunity; both of which assertions are
manifestly false. For it cannot be doubted that, by the will of God, men
are united in civil society. . . . God it is Who has made man for society.
. . . Wherefore civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and
Parent, and must believe and worship His power and authority. Justice,
therefore, and reason forbid that the State be godless. . . . Since then
the profession of a religion is necessary in the State, that one must be
professed which alone is true, and can be recognized without difficulty,

Vlll

Translator’s Preface

especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were,
engraven upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the State must
preserve and protect if they would provide, as they ought, with
prudence . . . for the good of the community.”

It is clear, then, that no Catholic may positively and unconditionally
approve of the policy of separation of Church and State. But, given a
country like the United States, where religious denominations abound
and the population is largely non-Catholic, it is clear that the policy of
treating all religions alike becomes, all things considered, a practical
necessity, the only way of avoiding a deadlock, Under such
circumstances, separation of Church and State is to be accepted, not
indeed as the ideal arrangement, but as a modus vivendi. Hence Pope
Leo concludes:

There remain those who, while they do not approve the
separation of Church and State, think nevertheless that the
Church ought to adapt herself to the times and to conform to
what is desired by the modern system of government. Such an
opinion is sound, if it is to be understood of an adaptation that
is consistent with truth and justice: in so far, namely, that the
Church, in the hope of some great good, may show herself
indulgent, and may conform to the times in whatever her sacred
office permits. But it is not so in regard to practices and
doctrines which a perversion of morals and a false judgment
have unlawfully introduced. Religion, truth and justice must
ever be maintained. . . .

From what has been said it follows that it is in no way lawful
to demand, to defend, or to grant, unconditional freedom of
thought, of speech, of writing, or of religion, as if they were so
many rights which nature had given to man. For if nature had
really given them, it would be lawful to refuse obedience to God,
and there would be no restraint to human liberty. It likewise
follows, that freedom in these things may be tolerated when
there is just cause; but only with such moderation as will
prevent its degenerating into license and excess. And where
such liberties are in use, men should use them in doing good
and should regard them as the Church does. . . .

Again it is not of itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of
government, if only the Catholic doctrine be maintained as to
the origin and use of power. Of the various forms of
government, the Church does not reject any that are suited to
the welfare of their subjects. . . . And the Church approves of
everyone giving his services for the common good, and of doing

IX

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

all that he can for the defense, and preservation, and prosperity
of his country.

History of Liberalism

Such, then, is the satanic and antisocial error of liberalism: satanic,
because it refuses to bend the knee before Divine truth and Divine
authority; antisocial, because it is a doctrine of selfish individualism,
which gives free rein to greed and egoism at the expense of the common
good. What were its historical beginnings?

Its roots lie deep in the paganizing Humanism of the fifteenth
century. As Greek men of letters — refugees from Turk-ridden
Constantinople — diffused knowledge of the Greek classics in Europe,
and as the first excavations brought to light masterpieces of Roman
sculpture and architecture, men began to conceive an intense
admiration for the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome and to question
the spiritual values of Christian culture. In the sequel, the desire to have
unhampered liberty and to model life on the licentious lines of Grecian
paganism became increasingly general. Men lost sight of the fact that
Christian culture had added to pagan beauty of form and color the
superior beauty of idea; they likewise failed to appreciate that, in
imposing morality, the Church was consulting their own best interests,
and was only forbidding what tended to corrupt human nature, not
what tended to perfect it either spiritually or physically. Swinburne, in
his Rape of Proserpine, has eloquently voiced the passionate protest of
pagan and neo-pagan against their common kill -joy — Christian
morality:

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take:

The laurel, the palm and the paean, the breasts of the
nymphs in the brake,

And all the wings of the loves; and all the joy before death.

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown
gray with Thy breath.

In the next century we have the yet more emancipating ethics of
Martin Luther (1483-1546), who found room in his synthesis of current
errors for the complete freedom of morals demanded by the paganizing
humanists. Man’s will-power, he claimed, had been so ruined by
original sin that it was useless to struggle against temptation. “Be a
sinner and sin boldly,” he urges in a letter he wrote in 1521, “but believe

X

Translator’s Preface

yet more staunchly and rejoice in Christ.” 1 Like the neo-pagans of
Humanism, the Christian, too, might henceforth enjoy full liberty of
action. Beyond faith he had no other duties. He might indulge to his fill
in sin. If only he retained an unwavering faith that God, in view of the
merits of Christ, would not take account of his wicked deeds, he need
have no fear on that score as to his salvation. No wonder that Luther, in
his Treatise on Christian Liberty, exclaims: “The Christian is the freest
lord of all things, subject to no one!”

Calvin (1509-1564) appropriated Luther’s principle of the
impossibility of meriting salvation by virtuous conduct, and so
“Christian liberty” came to Geneva, whence it traveled to Scotland and
to newly “reformed” England. Here it received a still more progressive
mouthpiece in the person of that forerunner of Rousseau and Smith —
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). He gave mankind this conception of
liberty:

“The right of Nature” ... is the liberty each man hath to use
his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own
nature, that is to say, of his own life; and consequently of doing
anything which in his own judgment and reason he shall
conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

By “liberty” is understood, according to the proper
signification of the word, the absence of external impediments:
which impediments may oft take away part of man’s power to
do what he would.2 3

From Geneva, too, came the real Father of political liberalism,
Calvinist Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). In his famous du Contrat
social (“On the Social Contract”) this man developed Hobbes’s fantasy
that Civil society had its origin in a pact. He begins this book with the
much-quoted sentence: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in
chains.” In the next chapter, he adds:

This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His
first law is to attend to his own preservation, his first cares are
those which he owes to himself; and as soon as he comes to the
years of discretion, being sole judge of the means, adapted for
his own preservation, he becomes his own masters

1 Epist. Luth. a Ioh. Aurifabro collectae I (Jen. 1556) 345.

2 Leviathan, Ch. XIV

3 Contrat social, Bk. I, Chap. II.

xi

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

Since no man has any natural authority over his fellow men,
and since force is not the source of right, contracts remain as
the basis of all lawful authority among men.4 5

But in order that such a contractual form of association may be
legitimate, he argues, the problem will be “to find a form of association
which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community
the person and property of every associate, and by means of which, each
coalescing with all may nevertheless obey only himself and remain as
free as before.” s

This problem finds its solution in that which, according to Rousseau,
is the basis of all civil societies, or States; namely the social contract
between free and equal individuals in which “each giving himself to all,
gives himself to nobody; and as there is not one associate over whom we
do not acquire the same rights which we concede to him over ourselves,
we gain the equivalent of all that we lose, and more power to preserve
what we have.” 6 7

The essence of the social contract is: “Each of us puts in common his
person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general
will; and in return we receive every member as an indivisible part of the
whole.” But what happens when the will of an individual is not the same
as the general will, when it fails to coincide with the majority- vote? If a
law is passed against his will, how can a man be said to be obeying his
own sweet will in obeying that law? How can individual liberty have its
way when it is overridden by the authority of the general will? How is
perfect individualism compatible with a functioning society?

Rousseau undertakes to solve this difficulty. “Indeed,” he admits,
“every individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or
divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen. ... In order,
then, that the social pact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly
includes this agreement, which alone can give force to the others, that
whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so
by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be
forced to be free.” 7 “Forced to be free,” is a sorry jest. The bald fact is
that here the general will ceases to be individual liberty and becomes
co-ercive authority.

Now, if the general will of the people is to replace God’s authority as
the last court of appeal, it follows that it must be as infallibly right as is

4 Ibid., Bk. I, Chap. IV.

5 Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. VI.

6 Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. VI.

7 Ibid., Bk. I, Ch. VII.

xii

Translator’s Preface

the will of God, in the authoritarian conception of society. This
Rousseau frankly admits: “It follows,” says he, “that the general will is
always right and always tends to the public advantage.” 8 9 Yet it is so
obvious that majorities and even totalities of voters are not always
right; it is so clear that mob rule seldom fails to be wrong, that
Rousseau is forced to resort to a second piece of sophistry in order to
save the situation. He distinguishes between the abstract “general will”
and the concrete “will of all.” The former, he says, is always right and
necessarily points to the public good as a compass needle always points
to the magnetic pole. The fact that the concrete “will of all” fails to do
this is because, owing to collusions and caucuses among the voters,
there is not enough individualism in the social body and so not enough
difference of opinion. Any form of association or coherence among the
voters tends to impede the faithful expression of the general will,
because: “The differences become less numerous and yield a less
general result.” This, of course, is the rankest kind of nonsense; for all
generalization is based, not upon the differences in a given group of
individuals, but upon their similarities or agreements. Nevertheless,
this ridiculous idea leads him to the disastrous conclusion: “It is
important, then, in order to have a clear declaration of the general will,
that there should be no partial association in the State, and that every
citizen should express only his own opinion.” 9

This principle was soon to be reduced to practice by the French
Revolution, one of the first acts of which was the decree of Chapelier
dissolving workmen’s guilds so that the laborer might “express only his
own opinion.” It led to the disruption of all “partial associations within
the State.” It portended that tragic achievement of Liberalistic misrule,
the dissolution of the occupational groups (the guilds), and even of the
domestic group (the family). In conformity with this pulverizing policy,
Liberalism has spared no effort to break down all organization within
the body politic, to extirpate all social organs and to reduce the social
organism to a disgregated chaos of helpless human monads destitute of
all coherence among themselves, like so many bird-shot in a cartridge.
As though from this incoherent mass of divided individuals, anything
like a coherent voice or intelligent vote on anything could ever arise! To
the accusing Socialists, we may turn over the prosecutor’s task of
indicting the arithmocratic Liberal for the fearful social havoc he has
wrought in all modern States by putting into practice this heartless,
pagan individualism of the Contrat social.

8 Ibid., Bk. II, Ch. III.

9 Ibid., bk. II, ch. III.

xiii

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

Published in 1762, that little book was destined to become the Bible
of the French Revolutionaries of 1789. Mirabeau, Mme. Rolland,
Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and the rest harkened to it with
reverential awe. For all of them, it was the inspired writing of mankind’s
greatest sage, or, as Thomas Carlyle puts it, “the Fifth Gospel” — “the
Gospel according to Jean Jacques;” 10 in all of them it awakened,
according to Auguste Comte, an enthusiasm greater “than the Bible or
the Coran ever succeeded in winning.” 11 The declamatory Revolutionary
Confession, entitled “La Declaration des Droits de Thomme et du
citoyen,” and voted in the August of 1789, simply formulates the
Revolution’s three basic dogmas — the Sovereignty of the people,
Liberty, Equality — in texts taken verbatim from the Contrat social.
Little wonder that Napoleon was led to declare: “But for Rousseau,
there would have been no Revolution.”

However, the Contrat social might never have become the Bible of
the Revolution, had it not been first the Bible of Freemasonry, had not
the Lodges popularized its revolutionary gospel of liberty, fraternity,
equality throughout the length and breadth of France.

Masonry, so the Masonic historian Mackey tells us, was imported
into France from England towards the beginning of the XVIIIth century.
Soon after (i. e., on April 27, 1738), French Catholics were warned of the
danger threatening them by the Bull In Eminenti of Clement XII
condemning Masonry.

The warning went unheeded; for nothing was done to obstruct the
progress of this conspiracy to overthrow Church and State in Catholic
France.

Far from meeting with opposition, the conspirators found the ground
well prepared for their evil work. France’s prosperity had been ruined
by the militarism of Louis XIV (1643-1715), which had saddled the
people with an enormous public debt, and by his absolutism, which had
broken down the very structure of government itself. In the throes of
the depression that ensued during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis
XVI, the people became more and more embittered against the King.
Hence, they were only too ready to believe the calumnies that the first
Grand Master of the Grand Orient12 circulated about his royal cousin

10 The French Revolution, bk. I, II, ch. VII, p. 44)

11 Politique positive, t. Ill, ch. VII).

12 As their Grand Master to lead this crusade against royalty and the Church in
France, the Freemasons elected Philip, the dissolute Duke of Chartres (afterwards
Duke of Orleans). In volume IV of Mackey’s History of Masonry (New York, 1921) we
are told that he was elected Grand Master of the Old Grand Lodge of France on June
24, 1771 (cf. p. 1290), becoming Grand Master of the Grand Orient when this

xiv

Translator’s Preface

and the Queen, Marie Antoinette. The resulting popular indignation
tipped the scales in favor of revolution as against peaceful reform.

The upshot was the Reign of Terror. Thanks, in large measure, to
Masonry, the Revolution was brought about in France and on the
Continent. A new social order was set up, in which the State was
secularized and religion banished from education and from public life.

So much for the political liberalism of Rousseau; we have now to
consider economic liberalism, the system of the Physiocrats, of Adam
Smith and Ricardo, who saw in Rousseau’s principle of unhampered
liberty a cure-all for mankind’s economic ills.

Economic Liberalism

This system originated with the sect of Rousseau’s disciples known as
Economists or Physiocrats. Frangois Quesnay (1694-1774) and Jean C.
M. V. de Gournay (1712-1759) were co-founders of said sect. About 1750
Quesnay, who was physician in ordinary to Louis XV, became
acquainted with de Gournay, and around the two the sect of Physiocrats
was formed. The Marquis de Mirabeau (1749-1791) is the only member
of this group whom we know to have been in personal correspondence
with Rousseau; for there is extant a letter of the latter addressed to the
Marquis under date of July 26, 1767. Another important member of the

superseded the Grand Lodge in 1774 (cf. p. 1299). “When,” remarks the Masonic
historian, “on the death of his father he became the Duke of Orleans, he developed a
dislike of the King (viz., Louis XVI), who had refused to elevate him to posts to which
his rank entitled him to aspire, but from which he was excluded by his blackened
reputation.

“Inspired with his dislike for the King and the Court, and moved by his personal
ambition, the Duke fostered the discontents which were already springing up among
the people” (p. 1296). Thereupon Mackey feels called upon to offer this word of
apology for the action of the Freemasons in setting up such a monster as their first
Grand Master: “When he was elected as Grand Master, the Duke of Chartres, though
very young (only 26), had already exhibited a foreshadowing of his future career of
infamy. Certainly enough was known to have made him unfit for choice as the leader
of a virtuous society. But motives of policy prevailed” (p. 1297).

In the sequel, this Grand Master renounced his ducal title, proclaimed himself “Le
Citoyen Philippe Egalite” ( Citizen Philip Equality ) and, having been elected to the
National Assembly, voted for the death of his cousin, King Louis XVI. Unfortunately
for himself, however, he became so enamored with equality that he made the mistake
of resigning his Grand Mastership and of repudiating Masonry. This he did in a letter
dated May 15, 1793. His indignant fellow Masons anathematized him in solemn
conclave and, breaking his Grand Master’s sword, declared said office vacant. Five
months later this scoundrelly ex-Grand Master was guillotined, viz., on October 31,
1793. (See op. cit., pp. 1303-1304.)

xv

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

sect was Baron A. R. J. Turgot (1727-1781), disciple of Quesnay and
later minister of finance in France.

The system of the Physiocrats, which is set forth in Quesnay’s
Tableau economique (“Economic Situation”), is an agricultural system
of economy, which holds the produce of the land to be the sole source of
the revenue and wealth of every country. What is distinctively
Rousseauan about it is Quesnay’s contention that under a regime of
perfect liberty, with no restraints imposed, there will be a natural
distribution of wealth conducive to the highest prosperity.

De Gournay, too, held that the prosperity of the State would
necessarily result from free and unrestricted competition among the
citizens. He expressed this view in his famous saying: “Laissez faire,
laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme” — Let things alone, let things
pass, the world goes on of itself.

Turgot, laying less stress on agriculture; advocated perfect freedom
of commerce and industry as the best means of augmenting public and
private wealth; it was his system, known as “le liberalisme
economique,” which alone won the unqualified approval of Adam Smith
(1723-1790); but outside of France proper, it was Adam Smith himself
who came to be hailed as the founder of economic liberalism.

When Adam Smith visited the Continent (1764-1766), he formed the
acquaintance of Quesnay and of several other Physiocrats, such as
Turgot and Mirabeau, but de Gournay, of course, was already dead.
Rousseau was still alive, but he was not among the liberalistic
doctrinaires whom Smith met at Paris. However, Smith’s friend, David
Hume, knew Rousseau and sheltered him in his own home when the
author of the Social Contract came as a refugee to England.

In 1784 Adam Smith published his famous work on political
economy, The Wealth of Nations. In this work, he formulated the basic
principle of economic liberalism in these memorable words:

All systems of either preference or restraint, therefore, being
thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of
natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as
long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly
free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both
his industry and capital into competition with those of any
other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely
discharged from . . . the duty of super-intending the industry of

XVI

Translator’s Preface

private people, and of directing it towards the employments
most suitable to the interest of society. «

This is that system of natural liberty, which has unchained all greed
to prey upon all weakness; this is that system of equal opportunity,
which has produced an increasingly wealthy group of millionaires and
an increasingly impoverished multitude of expropriated workers; this is
that system of rugged individualism that has made human life a war of
all against all — a pitiless Darwinian struggle for existence in which the
“fit” ruthlessly exterminate the “unfit.” Nor will the chronic social
sickness it has brought upon all modern nations ever be cured until the
last cankerous vestige of liberalism has been eliminated from human
society.

With his “natural liberty” and “removal of all restraints,” Adam
Smith gave the freest possible play to “enlightened selfishness.” And by
substituting for the just price of medieval days a “price settled by
competition,” he paved the way for the cruel exploitation of human
labor that has characterized our times. Reduced to practice, it enhanced
the inhuman horrors of the Industrial Revolution, revolting the
Christian soul of the author of Unto this Last. And John Ruskin did no
injustice to Adam Smith in pillorying him as “the half-bred and half-
witted Scotsman who taught the deliberate blasphemy: Thou shalt hate
the Lord thy God, damn His laws and covet thy neighbor’s goods.”

However, it is not to the devilish individualism of Smith, but to the
even more fiendish individualism of his disciple, David Ricardo, that we
owe the “iron law of wages.” This outrage on humanity that strangles all
pity for the exploited, that degrades human labor to the level of a
subhuman thing, that makes of it a marketable commodity subject, like
other commodities, to the law of supply and demand, is found in
Chapter V of Ricardo’s Pidnciples of Political Economy and Taxation:

Labor, like all other things that are bought and sold, and
whose quantity may increase or diminish, has its natural price
and its current price. The natural price of labour is that which is
indispensable to the workmen generally for their subsistence
and for the perpetuation of the species. The current price is the
price really paid, as the natural effect of the relation between
demand and supply, labor being dearer when there are few
workmen and cheaper when there are many.

13 The Wealth of Nations, Cannan ed., London, 1904, vol. II, bk. IV, ch. IX, p. 184.

xvii

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

It was the Ricardian law of wages that led straight to the Class War,
that tipped with flame the pen of Marx, that made Lasalle a “tribune” of
the disinherited!

Religious Liberalism

Here, as is so often the case, the religious question underlies all
others; for the plague of political and economic liberalism was born of
the godless, soulless, anti-Christian liberalism, which has legislated
morals and religion out of public life and relegated them to the privacy
of the individual human conscience.

Religious liberalism is the term used to designate that manifold
doctrine which, in greater or lesser measure, emancipates man from
God, God’s law and God’s revelation; whose practical upshot is the
divorce of the eternal from the temporal — the separation of Church
and State.

Religious liberalism has three principal forms:

(1) Absolute religious liberalism that emancipates human society
from religion by subordinating the Church to the State, which it regards
as the one supreme power and the sole source of human rights.

(2) Moderate religious liberalism whose formula is: The Church free
in a free State; this emancipates human society by isolating rather than
absorbing or suppressing the Church.

(3) Catholic liberalism — neither really Catholic nor really liberal —
which seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable, religion with irreligion, the
supremacy of God with the supremacy of the State.

Rousseau’s religious liberalism was of the first or absolute type. He
aimed at substituting the State for the Church, by imposing a “civil
religion,” which would make “each citizen love his duties.” “Outside of
this, the State has no interest whatever in religion.” Accordingly,
Rousseau preferred the Pagan to the Christian form of worship, seeing
that Christianity, “far from attaching the hearts of the citizens to the
State, detaches them from it, as it does from other earthly things. I
know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.” 14

According to Christ, religion’s main function is to procure man
eternal happiness in the next world, not temporal success in this — For
what doth it profit a. man if he gain the whole world, and suffer the
loss of his own soul? (Matthew 16:26).

According to Rousseau, religion’s main function is to induce men to
confine themselves exclusively to material goals; to reinforce with

14 Contrat Social, bk. IV, ch. VIII.

xviii

Translator’s Preface

conscientious motives an idolatrous performance of their civic duties.
In other words, the Church is to be subordinated to the State and its
existence will be tolerated only in so far as it subserves the temporal
prosperity of the State.

Absolute religious liberalism is, in fact, the very foundation-stone of
Rousseau’s entire political philosophy. As Penty rightly remarks,
“Rousseau’s ideas on civil religion do not appear until the last chapter,
but they provide the key to his whole position. In order to understand
Rousseau, it is necessary to read him backwards.” ^

It was his absolute religious liberalism, involving complete subjection
of the Church to the State, that inspired the French Revolutionaries to
enact their notorious Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which they
proceeded brutally to enforce by means of bloody persecution — by
means of mass executions of priests and religious.

That truly despotic “liberalism” provoked a natural reaction. Liberals
had to cast about for something not so extreme — for a more liberal
kind of liberalism, that would not utterly belie its name. They hit on
moderate liberalism, which, relinquishing the project of subordinating
Church to State, is content to sepat'ate the twain.

“The Church free in a free State” — the liberal Catholic finds this
revised formula most admirable; for to him it expresses the ideal
relation between Church and State. What, he asks, has religion to do
with politics? They have different fields, different ends, and different
means. Keep them apart, then, and do not mix them up. Give Caesar his
due as well as God. Did not Christ distinguish His Church from the
State when He distinguished the “things of Caesar” from the “things of
God”? That He did make this distinction, is very true, but it is also very
irrelevant.

In the first place, it is not of distinction, but of separation, that the
Masonic liberals speak. The words are not synonymous. A man’s
spiritual soul is not the same as his material body, and so it is wise for
him to distinguish his soul from his body. But it would be extremely
unwise, nay absolutely suicidal, for him to separate his soul from his
body.

In the second place, in Matthew, 22:21 (Mark, 12:17), Christ makes
“no distinction of persons,” as if one class of persons (private
individuals) were subject to God, while another class of persons (public
officials) were independent of the Supreme Ruler. He does make,
however, a distinction of things, in the sense that one class of things
(spiritual means, such as prayer, the virtues, the sacraments) subserve

15 A Guildmaris Interpretation of History, London, 1920, p. 198.

xix

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

man’s eternal life and are therefore called “the things that are God’s,”
while another class of things (material means, such as houses, food,
clothes, tools) subserve man’s temporal life and are therefore called
“the things that are Caesar’s,” Caesar being symbolic of the State, whose
duty it is to help men fulfill their temporal destiny.

For man, compounded of spiritual soul and material body, lives a
twofold life: the one, his temporal life, which begins in the womb and
ends in the tomb; the other, his eternal life, which commencing in time
shall never know an ending.

Each of these lives has its own purpose and its own set of means.
Nevertheless, the temporal welfare man seeks as his earthly destiny is
not an absolutely ultimate end. It is by its very nature subordinate to his
eternal destiny, which is to serve God, to save his immortal soul and so
enter into the happiness of contemplating Infinite Goodness and Beauty
forever.

It is the Church’s function to help man on to this eternal destiny; it is
the State’s function to help him to attain that measure of temporal
prosperity without which right living becomes a moral impossibility.
These are different functions unquestionably, but from their difference
it by no means follows that the ideal relation between Church and State
is one of estrangement — that the two should behave like persons who
have quarreled and are no longer on speaking terms with each other.

Finally, common sense will inevitably raise the questions: Did or did
not God create Caesar? and if God did create Caesar, how can Caesar be
independent of God? If the same God is Author of the State and
Founder of the Church, then how can it be His will that His State should
refuse to co-operate with His Church?

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, all the Eai'th is full of Thy glory.
— The loftiness of men shall be bowed down and the haughtiness of
men shall be brought low; and the Lord alone shall be exalted.

The highest civil official rules only with power derived from God and
must govern in strict conformity with the divine commands. God is no
respecter of persons. The pomp of presidents, emperors and dictators is
so much dust in His sight. That is what He plainly tells us on nearly
every page of Holy Writ.

Hear, therefore, ye kings and understand: learn, ye that are
judges of the ends of the Earth. Give ear, you that rule the
people, and that please yourselves in multitudes of nations: For
power is given by the Lord, and strength by the Most High, who
will examine your works, and search out your thoughts: Because
being ministers of his kingdom, you have not judged rightly, nor

XX

Translator’s Preface

kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of God.
Horribly and speedily will He appear to you: for a most severe
judgment shall be for them that bear rule. For to him that is
little, mercy is granted: but the mighty shall be mightily
tormented. For God will not except any man’s person, neither
will He stand in awe of any man’s greatness: for He made the
little and the great, and He hath equally care of all. But a
greater punishment is ready for the mighty. To you, therefore, O
kings, are these my words, that you may learn wisdom and not
fall from it.” ( Wisdom , 6 :2-io.)

One concluding remark: it may be objected that what Veuillot has
written holds true of European liberalism but not of liberalism as the
term is understood in America. By the time the reader has finished
reading The Liberal Illusion, he will know that this is not so.
Meanwhile, suffice it to note that Liberalism’s cardinal principle, the
secularization of society, has in the United States nearly two million
staunch upholders in the active membership of the Masonic lodges
alone, and that Christianity expurgated of Christ is everywhere the so-
called “true religion” of Masonry.

Liberal Catholics, too, we shall always have with us; for they are,
unfortunately, a universal phenomenon. A friend of the writer calls
them “fleshpotters,” defining them as those who, born within the
embattled sanctuary of the Church, lean longingly from her sacred
merlons (as far as mortal hazard may) to gaze with avid eyes upon the
reeking fleshpots of unorthodoxy.

Your liberal Catholic invariably has “good friends among the
Masons” and, Papal pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding,
can vouch for them individually and collectively as being above
reproach. He has never heard of Leo XIII’s Encyclical Humanum
Genus, “On the Sect of the Masons,” and would probably deprecate it if
he had. But Grand Commander Albert Pike, pundit of American
Masonry, not only heard of it, he read it and penned in reply a bitter
attack upon the Papacy.

However, even genuine Catholics are apt to think of the American
liberal as not being secularistic and godless like his European brother.
If such be the case, the “religious” views voiced by a former famous
president of Harvard University, Dr. Charles Eliot, will suffice to
disillusion them. Expounding his project of a “new” civic religion —
which, to tell the truth, is as old as Rousseau, not to speak of pagan
antiquity — he says:

XXI

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

The new religion will not attempt to reconcile people to
present ills by the promise of future compensation. I believe the
advent of just freedom has been delayed for centuries by such
promises. Prevention will be the watchword of the new religion.

It cannot supply consolation as offered by old religions, but it
will reduce the need of consolation.16

Now, the atheistic communist is not at all averse to such a statement
of the case. He says to the secularistic liberals: “You are quite right in
discarding God and the hereafter as outworn superstitions: there is no
Heaven for man beyond the grave. Hence, it behooves all of us to get
whatever enjoyment we can out of our present existence — all of us, I
say: therefore, it is high time that this earthly heaven of ours should
cease to be monopolized by a few coupon-holding capitalists and
become instead the property of the workers, who are far more entitled
than wealthy idlers to happiness here below and who cannot look
forward to compensation for present privations in a future life.”

To this, the liberal may reply with tear-gas or with machine-guns, but
he can make no logical rejoinder. Atheistic communism is annihilated
by the Christian doctrines of Creation, of original and actual sin, of
judgment and the resurrection of the dead, but to all attacks leveled at it
from the premises of godless and soulless liberalism, it is absolutely
invulnerable.

16 Charles Elliott, The New Religion.

XXII

The Liberal Illusion

By

Louis Veuillot

i

MACKING of heresy . . . Some time ago I had occasion to plumb the
truth and depth of this expression, while listening to a lengthy
discourse by a man as upright as one could wish, devout, busy with

good works, learned, enthusiastic, full of beautiful illusions, but full,

alas! also of himself.

He had styled himself a “liberal” Catholic.

Asked to explain the difference between a liberal Catholic and a
Catholic pure and simple, who believes and practices what the Church
teaches, he replied: “There is no. difference!” Nevertheless, he
intimated that the Catholic pure and simple is an unenlightened
Catholic. When it was objected that then, from his point of view as a
liberal Catholic, the Catholic Church herself must be unenlightened, he
met the objection by rushing into certain finical distinctions and
confusions between the Church and the Roman Curia. Apropos of briefs
— Latin letters and encyclicals published in these latter days — the
expression Curia Romana came glibly on his tongue as something right
to the point for clearing up the difficulty. However, nothing clear
resulted from it.

Urged to say a word in explanation of what he meant by
unenlightened, he began to digress on human liberty, on the changes
that have taken place in the world, on periods of transition, on the
abuses and disadvantages of repression, on the danger of enjoying
privileges and the advisability of relinquishing them. ... In this flow of
verbiage, we could recognize various shreds and tatters of the
revolutionary doctrines that have been wrangled over or, rather,

i

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

bandied about since 1830. They originated with Lamennais and lasted
up to the time of Proudhon. But what struck us most forcibly was the
insistence with which our liberal Catholic characterized us as intolerant
Catholics. Thereupon we stopped him. Forgetting, this time, about the
“Roman Curia,” he admitted that what he disliked about the Church was
her intolerance. “She has always,” said he, “interfered too much with
the human mind. Upon the principle of intolerance, she set up an even
more oppressive secular power. This power served the Church herself
more faithfully than it served the world. Catholic governments
intervened to impose the faith; this gave rise to the violent measures
that have revolted the human conscience and plunged it into unbelief.
The Church is perishing by reason of the unlawful support she has seen
fit to accept from the State. The time has come for her to change her
attitude. The thing for the Church to do is to renounce all power of her
own to coerce conscience and to deny such power to governments. No
more union of Church and State: let the Church have nothing to do with
governments, and let governments have nothing to do with religions, let
them no longer meddle in each other’s affairs! The individual may
profess whatever religion he likes, according to his own personal views;
as a citizen of the State, he has no particular religion. The State
recognizes all religions, it assures them all of equal protection, it
guarantees to each of them equal liberty, this being the regime of
tolerance; and it behooves us to pronounce the latter good, excellent,
salutary, to preserve it at all costs, to spread it perseveringly. One may
say that this regime is of Divine right: God himself has established it by
creating man free; He puts it into practice by making His sun to shine
alike on the good and the wicked. As for those who disregard the truth,
God will have His day of justice, which man has no right to anticipate.

“Each religious denomination, free in a free State, will induct its own
proselytes, guide its own faithful, excommunicate its own dissenters;
the State will take no account of these matters, it will excommunicate
nobody and will never itself be excommunicated. The civil law will
recognize no such thing as an ecclesiastical immunity, religious
prohibition, or religious obligation; church edifices shall pay taxes on
their doors and windows, the theological student shall do military
service, the bishop shall serve on the jury and in the National Guard,
the priest may marry if he will, be divorced if he will, and re-marry if he
will. Neither, on the other hand, will there be disabilities or prohibitions
of a civil nature any more than there will be disqualifications or
immunities of any other sort. Every religion may preach, publish its
books, ring its bells and bury its dead according to its own fancy, and
the ministers of religion may be all that any other citizen is eligible to

2

Louis Veuillot

be. Nothing, so far as the State is concerned, will stand in the way of a
bishop’s commanding his Company in the National Guard, keeping
shop, or conducting a business; neither will anything stand in the way
of his Church’s, or a Council’s or the Pope’s right to depose him from his
ecclesiastical office. The State takes cognizance of nothing else than the
facts of public order.”

II

Our liberal Catholic grew enthusiastic in unfolding these marvels. He
contended that no exception could be taken to his stand; that reason,
faith and the spirit of the times alike spoke in his behalf. As regards the
spirit of the times, nobody contested his assertion. When it came to
reason and faith, however, he was not let off without objections, but he
shrugged his shoulders and was never at a loss for an answer. It is true
that outrageous statements and outrageous contradictions cost him no
qualms whatever. He always started off on the same foot, protesting
that he was a Catholic, a child of the Church, an obedient child; but at
the same time a man of the world, a member of the human race arrived
now at maturity and of an age to govern itself. To the arguments taken
from history he replied that mankind, in its present state of maturity,
constituted an altogether new world, in the face of which the history of
the past proved absolutely nothing. To the words of the Fathers of the
Church he sometimes opposed other words of theirs, at other times he
said that the Fathers spoke for their own times and that we must think
and act for our times. Confronted with texts from Scripture, he would
either tear out of their context seemingly contrary texts, or devise an
interpretation calculated to support his own opinion, or, finally, he
would say that the texts in question applied only to the Jews and their
little theocracy. Nor was he embarrassed to any greater degree by the
dogmatic bulls of the “Roman Curia”: the Bull Unam Sanctam ^ of
Boniface VIII caused him to smile; it had been withdrawn, he claimed,
or else revised. We pointed out that the Popes had inserted it into the
Corpus Juris Canonici and that it has always remained there. He
answered: “It is out of date and the world has changed since then!” The
Bull In Ccena Domini and all subsequent bulls he found equally out of

v “Urged by Faith, we are obliged to believe and to hold that the Church is one, holy,
Catholic, and also Apostolic. We firmly believe in her, and we confess absolutely that
outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins . . . Furthermore, we
declare, say, define and pronounce, that it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every
human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”

3

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

date — they were mere disciplinary formulas, he said, made for their
times, but having no reason for existence to-day. The French Revolution
had buried these antiquated regulations along with the old world which
they formerly oppressed. Repression had been abolished; the man of to-
day was capable of liberty and wanted no other law!

“This new order,” he went on to say, “which so disconcerts your
timidity, is for all that the very one that will save the Church and the
only one that can save her. Besides, the human race is up in arms to
impose this order, there is nothing for it but to submit, and this has
already been done. Imagine anyone daring to resist this triumphant
force! Who would even dream of doing so? Intolerant Catholics, you are
more absolute than God the Father who created man for liberty; more
Christian than God the Son who does not wish His law to be established
otherwise than by way of liberty. On this question, you are now more
Catholic than the Pope18; for the Pope, by approving of modern
constitutions — all of which are inspired and permeated by the spirit of
liberty — has given them his blessing. I say that the Pope, the Vicar of
Jesus Christ, has approved of these constitutions, because he has done
just that in permitting you to take the oath of allegiance to them, to
obey them and to defend them. Now, liberty for all religions and the
atheism of the State are part and parcel of said constitutions. You have
to overlook that point, and you do overlook it — of that there can be no
doubt.

“For the rest, why do you persist in your opposition? Your resistance
is vain; your regrets are not only senseless, they are positively criminal.
They cause the Church to be hated and they are the source of much
embarrassment to us liberal Catholics, your saviors, in that they cause
our sincerity to be suspected. Instead of drawing down on yourselves
certain and probably terrible retribution, run to the arms of Liberty,
welcome her, embrace her, love her. She will bestow upon you more
than you can ever repay. The Faith stagnates under the yoke of a
protecting authority: obliged to defend itself, it will reawaken; the heat
of controversy will rekindle its spark of life. What may we not expect the
Church to undertake, once she is free to take up anything? How can she
fail to appeal to the hearts of the people when they see her forsaken by
the mighty ones of the world — deserted by the powers that be and
forced to live exclusively by her own resources, her own genius, her own
virtues? Amid the confusion of doctrines and the corruption of morals,
she will stand out solitary — unique in her purity and unique in her

'8 PiuS IX.

4

Louis Veuillot

affirmation of good. She will be the last refuge, the impregnable
rampart of morality, of the family, of religion, of liberty!”

5

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

III

Everything has its limits, and so the breath of our orator gave out at
last. As he had interested us, if not by the novelty of his doctrines, at
least by his frankness in expressing them, we had allowed him to talk on
without interruption. Obliged to refill his lungs with air, he interrupted
himself. Someone took advantage of the lull to point out the emptiness
of his maxims, the incoherence of his reasoning, the groundlessness of
his hopes. He listened with the air of a man who is less intent on
weighing what is said to him than on finding a way to dispute it.

I must confess that what his opponent said, though sound in reason
and full of good sense, did little to reassure me. Unquestionably, he
made some telling points that were unanswerable, and there was none
among those present who did not heartily agree that he was right. But in
spirit I enlarged the audience, so as to take in the general public, and
instantly there came upon me the sad realization of the utter
helplessness of reason in matters like the present.

For on questions such as these it is the multitude, swayed and
determined by sentiment alone, that passes final judgment. Reason is a
weight it cannot bear. The multitude obeys its passions, it loves
destruction; it applauds whenever it surmises that something is to be
torn down. And what can compare with the Church as a thing to tear
down! Herein lies the secret of the success of heresies — all of them
absurd, all of them refuted by unanswerable reasons, yet all of them
triumphant over reason for a certain period of time, which has seldom
been of short duration.

Weakened by sin, humanity is naturally inclined to error, and an
inclination to error is an inclination to death, or rather error is itself
death. This fact alone, evident on every side, proves to the hilt that the
civil power itself is under obligation to acknowledge the truth and to
defend it with the might that society places in its hands. Only on that
condition can society live; it has never so much as undertaken to live on
any other terms. No sage of paganism has ever set up as ideal head of a
State a type of ruler who was not the armed and resolute defender of
truth and justice. Jethro gave this counsel to Moses: “And provide out
of all the people able men, such as fear God, in whom there is truth, and
that hate avarice, and appoint of them rulers of thousands, and of
hundreds.” ^ Cicero, at the other end of the ancient world, writes: “A
State cannot exist any more than a home, unless the good are rewarded

'9 Exodus, 18: 21.

6

Louis Veuillot

and the wicked punished.” 20 This duty to uphold justice, and by
consequence to acknowledge the truth, is of the very essence of
government, irrespective of all constitutions and all political forms. God
menacing the rebellious people says to them: “I will give thee a king in
my wrath, and will take him away in my indignation.” 21 All of Scripture
is full of this light. But of what avail is Divine reason and human reason,
when ignorance is in control! From the thick of the multitude there
emanates some sort of fog that obscures the mental vision of even the
more intelligent, and you meet any number of intellectuals who will
never more see clearly except by the light of incendiary fires already
broken out. When one studies this phenomenon, it appears so strange
and terrifying that one may well recognize in it something of the divine.
The divine wrath blazes forth, it triumphs, it punishes the long
contempt of truth.

IV

The liberal had recovered his breath, he resumed his discourse. It
was plain to see that what he had heard had made no impression on
him, if indeed he had heard it at all. He added lots of other words to
those he had already spoken in great profusion; but he said nothing
new. It was all a hotch-potch of historical arguments against history, of
biblical arguments against the Bible, of patristic arguments against
history, Bible, Fathers and even against common sense. He showed the
same disdain, I ought rather to say the same repugnance, for the bulls
of the Sovereign Pontiffs, he lost himself in the same declamations and
the same prophecies. He rehashed the same cant about the world being
new, humanity emancipated, the Church asleep but soon to wake up
and rejuvenate her creed. The dead past, the radiant future, liberty,
love, democracy, humanity were interspersed here and there like the
false brilliants that the ladies nowadays scatter through their equally
false tresses. Nothing was made more clear than the first time he said it.
He became aware of this eventually, and told us that we were separating
ourselves from the world and from the living Church, too, which would
presently repudiate us; he all but anathematized us, and left us, finally,
filled with consternation at his folly.

Everyone expressed his regret and advanced certain arguments
against the extravagances he had uttered. For my part, I too shared the

20 On the Nature of the Gods.

21 Osee, 13:11.

7

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

regret of the others, to see so fine a man embedded in so great an error.
But since that, after all, was a fact, I was not sorry to have witnessed the
spectacle and learned from it a lesson.

Up till then I had not seen the liberal Catholic except as lost in the
crowd of traditional and integral Catholics, that is to say, “intolerant”
Catholics. I had only known the official thesis, which is never complete
and which varies with every individual, presenting personal
peculiarities that his party may disavow. This enthusiast contrived to
give me the esoteric lore along with the exoteric thesis. From then on I
understood the liberal Catholic through and through. I knew by heart
his sophisms, his illusions, his fixations, his tactics. And alas! nothing of
it all was new to me. The liberal Catholic is neither Catholic nor liberal.
By that I mean — without any intention of questioning his sincerity —
that he has no more the true notion of liberty than he has the true
notion of the Church. Liberal Catholic though he fain would be, he bears
all the ear-marks of a better-known character — a type only too familiar
in the history of the Church. Everything about him betokens the
SECTARY: that is his real name.

V

This foe is not one to be despised, even though he be equipped with
nothing more formidable than chimeras. There are some chimeras that
reason may not safely attack single-handed; for it would be sure to be
defeated, not by the chimeras, but by the complicity of human souls.

Human souls are sick, and sick with a terrible disease: they are tired
of the truth and afraid of it! In souls that are still Christian this disease
manifests itself in a lack of horror for heresy, in a chronic state of
complacency towards error, in a certain fascination for snares, often in
a shameful eagerness to let oneself be caught. It is not an entirely
modern ailment, for it is rooted in the very heart of man. “I love to be
caught,” exclaims St. Augustine. Father Faber speaks of it as the
characteristic political physiognomy of our time. The liberal siren
conceals her poisonous locks, shows her rosy face, and holds the cross
in her hand. She easily lures victims to the brink of the abyss; she
seduces the eyes, the reason, the heart. Unless the spirit of obedience
guards us, we are taken captive. We must be eternally vigilant, in order
to remain the same, in order not to become suddenly different.

The siren’s song evokes dangerous echoes. Not a few of the so-called
liberal maxims are specious and more than embarrassing for whoever
fails to meet them with flat contradictions. Now, the Faith alone

8

Louis Veuillot

provides us with these victoriously flat contradictions. There is nothing
so perilous as shuffling on the matter of words. Treason in words will
soon compass the ruin of principles in a secretly tempted soul. Let us
not forget that heresy excels in pampering all weaknesses and in turning
to account all lusts. Liberal Catholicism is a very convenient garment to
wear: it makes a perfect court robe, academic robe, robe of glory; it
lends the colors of pride without transgressing the counsels of
prudence; it has entree to the Church and it is welcome in all palaces
and even in all taprooms.

Great advantages surely, and all to be had at what seems to be quite a
low price. Only a few liberal words to be accepted, only a few
“intolerant” words to be foresworn — this is all that is required; even
less than that, a hurrah for that fellow, a boo for somebody else — the
liberal church exacts no other profession of faith. But once a man
pronounces the sacramental words, he is already far on the way. This
simple shifting of words quickly brings about an enormous shifting of
ideas. Along comes a skillful propagandist who knows just how to throw
a veil over the nudities of a conscience already hankering to deceive
itself, and the liberal thesis triumphs. What is true is found to be false,
and vice versa. One can henceforth tolerate and even repeat outrageous
statements. One no longer experiences any difficulty in admitting that
from a century back everything has radically changed, not only on Earth
but even in Heaven; that there is a new humanity on Earth, a new God
in Heaven. Sure mark of heresy! For by implication, at least, if not in so
many words, every heresy has proclaimed this blasphemy. Let us pause
here for a moment.

VI

Let us place ourselves at the door of a church; from among the
faithful who come to hear Mass, let us select at random a group of fifty
human beings, then let us go back twenty-five or thirty years: we shall
find that the majority of our group either were not even men thirty
years ago, or were wanderers outside the fold of truth. That by and large
is the case with all the living. Speaking in the language of Christianity,
we may say of the vast majority of mankind, either that they are as yet
unborn, or that they are already dead and serve no other purpose than
to transmit death.

This — this multitude of children, ghosts and corpses — this is that
humanity which is old enough, which has arrived at adulthood, which is
mature and perfect! It is now in full possession of reason,

9

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

enlightenment and justice, capable at last of governing itself. And if God
still presumes to govern it, He will do well to do so more considerately
for the future than He has in the past, either through laws He will
directly inspire, or through laws which mankind itself will know how to
formulate without His help, and to which, in any case, His old-
fashioned Church does not hold the key.

The Fathers have well said that the Church is incapable of growing
old — Ecclesia insenescibilis; but the Fathers themselves are old and the
Church is senile; she is positively decrepit. The Holy Ghost — who no
longer thinks what He formerly thought — no longer reveals what He
thinks to the Church; she has no inkling of it any more! Therefore the
Holy Ghost has changed His ways; therefore the eternal God has
become different like humanity, which has likewise become different, so
different that God’s former directives no longer apply.

Catholic liberalism virtually accepts this more than Protestant view
of the vitality of the Sacred Scriptures, of their inspiration and of their
interpretation by the Church. It calls upon us to swallow these
impertinences, unless we are prepared to see the human race withdraw
from us. They set the example, they withdraw. But in separating, it is
the Church that they accuse of doing the separating. Another mark of
the heretic.

VII

I do not say that the liberal Catholics are heretics. They must first
have the will to be so. Of many of them I affirm the contrary; of the rest
I know nothing, and it is not for me to judge. On this question the
Church will pronounce judgment at the proper time, if there be occasion
to do so. But whatever be their virtues and whatever the good intentions
that inspire them, I believe them to be introducing among us a heresy,
and one of the most out-and-out heresies the world has ever seen.

I do not know whether the world will escape it. I doubt that it will.
Catholic liberalism and the spirit of the world are blood brothers; they
shade into each other by imperceptible degrees. Amid the great mass of
atheists, deists, eclectics, ignoramuses, and would-be inquirers there
are a good many feeble consciences that want only a convenient and
“tolerant” form of religion. Even within the Church, numbers of tired,
tempted, timid souls are to be met with who would shrink equally from
open apostasy and from an open break with the world. We see in Italy
certain excommunicated priests who obstinately persist in celebrating
Mass, but who would have vigorously protested had anyone predicted

10

Louis Veuillot

five or six years ago their present fall from grace. . . . The heresy that
does not quite deny the truth, that does not quite affirm the error,
opens a channel for these vain waters: they precipitate themselves into
it from the two opposite slopes, and so contrive to swell the torrent.

11

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

VIII

When heresy reaches the flood stage, there is only one high ground
that cannot be submerged, only one place of refuge, and that is the
ROCK. “Thou art Peter . . . and the gates of Hell shall not prevail” — Tu
est Petrus . . . et non prsevalebunt.

It is not, says the Bishop of Tulle, a rolling stone, to-day in one place,
yesterday in another place, to-morrow in a third place. Neither is it a
plastic rock that men can shape to suit their taste. The rock remains in
its place, its matter, its form, all of it is unchangeable. The Rock, on its
own part, does not accommodate itself to the times, in order to keep
abreast of them — in order to be “of its time.”

People are fond of insisting that the Church ought to be of her time. A
silly piece of advice, to say the least. The Church is of her time and will
always be so, because she is of all times. If that were all one meant to
say, he would simply be wasting words. Unfortunately, in the parlance
of liberalism these words have a sense that is literally horrifying. The
Church ought to be of her times, even when those “times” do not wish
her to be in existence at all; and, by a natural consequence, God too
ought to be of His time: that is to say, God ought to run with the hour,
but ought not to start with it until the hand of man deigns to reverse the
hourglass! In other words, there is no Church and it is man who creates
God. Such formulas are a commentary on the age that accepts them.
Verily we are embroiled in an orgy of nonsense.

Let us extricate ourselves; let us cling to the unchangeable, so
shamefully denied and insulted.

Peter is the Eternal Rock, and this Rock — prefigured in the
Scriptures — is the Mountain of Salvation, the Mountain where it hath
pleased God to dwell. Our Lord, speaking to Simon and petrifying him
into the Rock, says to him: Thou art, just as he says of Himself, I am
Who am. Thou art chosen by an eternal design for an eternal work. It is
an accomplished fact. Peter, Mouth of Christ,22 speaks eternally the
Divine word; Peter is eternally the ROCK that God has placed, the
Mountain where God is pleased to dwell. So God has willed, so God has
done; and what God has done shall never be undone nor better done.

Now, in what capacity does God dwell upon this Mountain of His own
creation, upon this Rock harder and more lasting than all the things of
Earth? In the capacity of KING. This leaves Liberalism without a leg to
stand on.

22 St. John Chrysostom.

12

Louis Veuillot

IX

Jesus Christ is the King of the world, He speaks to the world through
His Priest, and the decrees of this Priest, being an expression of the
royal rights of Jesus Christ, are eternal. They apply not to one time
alone, but to all times; not to one society alone, but to all societies; not
to some men, but to all men. And since they have been prescribed in
accordance with the nature of Humanity by the Creator Himself of
Humanity, everywhere human society has need of them, everywhere its
instinct calls for them by dint of cries, of sighs, of recurrent troubles, of
unutterable pangs; for outside their empire nothing good exists, nor has
anything good the fullness and assurance of life. That is the reason why
there is no time, no society, no man from whom the faithful of Christ
ought not to exact some form of obedience to the decrees of the Priest of
Christ the King of the World.

The children of the Christ, the children of the King, are kings. They
form an absolutely superior society, whose duty it is to take possession
of the Earth and reign over it for the purpose of baptizing all men and of
raising them to that selfsame supernatural life, that selfsame royalty
and that selfsame glory for which Christ has destined them. They ought
to strive for that goal, because the only way of realizing the ideal of
universal liberty, universal equality, universal fraternity is to establish
the universal reign of Christ. For the liberty that is man’s due is liberty
to attain his supernatural end, which is union with Christ; and the only
society ever known to recognize all men as equals and as brothers is the
society of the disciples of Christ.

In the normal order, Christian society is maintained and extended by
means of two powers that ought to be distinct — not separated; united
— not confused; one above the other — not equal. The one is the head,
the other the arm; the one is the supreme and sovereign word of the
Pontiff, the other the social power.

Christian society, being firstly and above all Christian, submits
wholly to this first law; and it puts all things in their place, because it
first of all puts in His place its sole Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.

It puts Him in His sovereign place in society, as all the faithful put
Him in His sovereign place among souls; and out of this arises order,
liberty, unity, greatness, justice, empire, peace.

Thus, across the breaches opened by human passions, by human
weakness, and in spite of them, was formed in its magnificent variety
that commonwealth of Europe which could be called the Christian
Republic or even the Christian Family; a wonderful work, broken up by
heresy just when the internal peace and the progress of the arts gave

13

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

glorious promise of extending to the entire human race the fruits of the
Redemption. Had Catholic unity been maintained until the XVIth
century, there would no longer be any infidels, nor idolaters, nor slaves;
the human race would be Christian to-day, and owing to the number
and diversity of the nations coalescing in the unity of faith, it would be
safe from the danger of universal despotism so imminent to-day.

X

These two powers, united, distinct and one above the other, whereby
Christian society is ruled, have been called the two swords. For the word
would be of no avail, if it could not be at certain moments a sword. The
meekness of Christ has willed that there should be two swords, so that
the advent of repression might be delayed and the need of it forestalled.

The first sword, the one that cleaves nothing but darkness, remains
in the patient and infallibly enlightened power of the Pontiff. The other,
the material sword, is in the hand of the representative of society, and
in order that it may make no mistake, it is in duty bound to obey the
commandment of the Pontiff. It is the Pontiff who bids it come forth
from the scabbard and who bids it return thereto. Its duty is to repress
aggressive error, once it has been defined and condemned, to shackle it,
to strike it down; to give protection to the truth, whether the latter is
under the necessity of defending itself, or has need, in its turn, to go on
the offensive. The secular arm ought to clear the way for the truth, to
assure it liberty of teaching, to guard afar the way of its ambassadors
and of its followers. It has been said to the Apostles: “Going therefore,
teach ye all nations; baptizing them.” It has been enjoined upon us to
pray for the coming of the kingdom of God: Thy kingdom come. This
commandment implies the duty on the part of all peoples to receive the
messengers of Christ, and gives to Christian society the right at least to
protect their lives. It is enough that they should endure exile, hunger,
toil, insults, that they should die of want, that they should be devoured
by wild beasts; the Christian commonwealth has certainly the right to
demand that they shall not, besides all that, have to run the risk of
falling into the hands of the executioner, and that the persons of their
converts, who have entered the family, shall be as sacred as the persons
of the missionaries themselves. Such are the duties of the power
obedient to the commandment of the Pontiff. It is his part to see that
this divine order, which was given to Peter after he was invested with
the primacy, is carried out: “Arise, kill and eat.” That is to say,

14

Louis Veuillot

according to the interpretation of the Fathers: Kill error, which is death,
and transform it into thy light, which is life.

XI

Whenever we say such things, Free Thought raises the cry of
“theocrat !“ as it would the cry of “assassin!” It pretends to take fright in
a way that frightens us a good deal more than it is frightened itself. By
means of this buffoonery, it steps up prudence to a point where it
amounts to sheer hysteria, to a point where it amounts to downright
betrayal of the truth. It suppresses the assertion, nay, even the bare
mention, of the most elementary and necessary Christian right.

Certainly the prudence is not without excuse. For whenever the free-
thinkers pretend to be alarmed, they think themselves dispensed from
every consideration of reason and justice, and the Church is in for a
persecution. The liberal Catholic never fails to play upon this sensitive
chord: “Will nothing do you but to preach theocracy? Do you want to
have us all stoned?” Yet, just because our opponents are incurably
unjust, ought we like cowards to strike our colors, and can it be that not
to see any longer, not to know any longer, not to think any longer is the
primary condition on which we are to enjoy the liberty that befits us?
Let us scorn the trickery of words, and let not all the lackeys and
henchmen of the prsetorium, where Free Thought presumes to sit in
judgment on the Christ, ever cow us into saying: “I know not the man!”
We owe obedience to the Church within the limits that she herself has
established, and which for the rest are ample enough, so that rebellion
and pride may have no lack of leeway. If this obedience is theocracy,
those that are sincerely afraid of it are not very much afraid of
something else. In public life no less than in private life, there is but one
way to escape from the kingdom of the Devil, and that is to submit to
the kingdom of God. We have behind us in history, up to the very
threshold of the present, and even in the present, lots of examples of the
use which human autocracy has seen fit to make of the two swords. One
would not have to search very long on the Earth to find the people that
would have everything to gain, including in the first place life itself,
were the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the spiritual King, able to say to the
temporal king: “Put up thy sword into the scabbard.”

15

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

XII

The Christian is priest, the Christian is king, and he is made for a
higher glory. God must reign in us, God must reign through us, in order
that we may merit to reign with God. Here we have certain rules of faith
that we cannot keep apart from our rules of political life. Our rank is
sublime, our dignity is divine; we cannot abdicate our present destiny,
we cannot shirk its exceedingly high and exceedingly urgent duties —
duties of the public no less than of the private order — without
abdicating by that very fact our future dignity. We do not possess
wealth, power, freedom, life for the sake of ourselves alone: attached to
every gift bestowed on us is the obligation of using it to protect the
multitude of our weak and ignorant brothers, both as regards their
souls and as regards their bodies. Now, the main way to protect the
weak is to enact such laws as will make it easier for them to know God
and to be in communion with God. Upon this point we shall be
examined and judged, nor does any Christian believe for a moment that,
on the day when he is called upon to give an account of the little ones he
has contemptuously abandoned, or defended without courage and love,
he will be able to excuse himself on Caine’s plea: Am I my brother’s
keeper?

XIII

What is the meaning of this argument of human liberty, which is
forever cropping up in liberal Catholicism by way of a thousand
tortuous and covert paths? Man has the power (or faculty) of doing evil
and of not doing good. Who doesn’t know that and who denies it? But it
is strange folly indeed to conclude that God, in granting man this
power, gave him the example and precedent of impartiality between
truth and error, between good and evil. The least reflection will bring to
mind any number of divine and merciful barriers with which God has
curbed the evil exercise of our power to choose and to refrain. He takes
away from us the recourse of choosing annihilation and leaves us no
choice except to decide between two eternities. To refrain from making
that choice is to have already chosen. This is what is called with so
much emphasis human freedom!

This miserable quid pro quo is the foundation on which the whole
doctrine of liberalism is built. There is no such thing as human freedom
in this perilous sense; God has not made weak creatures a present of
this dangerous gift. God alone is free. To us He has given, not freedom,

16

Louis Veuillot

but free will. What we are really free to do is whatever we can do with
impunity in the sight of an infinitely just God. Well and good, can we
then with impunity refuse to obey God, refuse to serve Him, refuse to
see to it that, so far as in us lies, God is obeyed and served? Can we with
impunity refuse to hear the Church?

This is the question stated in its only true light. All efforts to dodge it,
however much they may be applauded, amount to nothing more than
futile displays of futile ingenuity.

The appearance of the Encyclical Quanta Cura 23 was the signal for a
new crop of these shallow quibbles. Various explanations of the
Encyclical, more or less respectful in tone, reduced it to a few
fundamentals that meant little more than nothing. By the end of a year
it became apparent that it was the explanations that meant little more
than nothing. We had read in the first days that the Encyclical
contained absolutely nothing “but the necessary and legitimate
condemnation of unlimited liberty.”

The Encyclical does not bother at all about unlimited liberty, which is
a folly and a heresy against the governments themselves, and one
against which governments know quite well how to defend themselves;
it warned Catholics of the danger to which they expose their brothers
and themselves, by crying up, in spite of the Church’s teachings, certain
rash affirmations which it brands in the aggregate as “the liberty of
perdition.” Of this liberty the Encyclical traces in outline, the Syllabus
in detail, the unmistakable features. Obviously the remarks having to do
with the ravings of indifferentism, of infidelity, or of heresy have little
or no reference to the faithful. But if one takes the trouble to peruse the
errors stigmatized as contrary to the Church’s rights, to her authority,
and to the obedience due to her, he will find out what the “liberty of
perdition” means.

And this sort of liberty the secular powers do not combat as they do
the insanity of unlimited liberty; but, on the contrary, they positively
favor it and even enforce it. In so doing, their instinct does not play
them false! All that emancipates man from the power of God subjugates
him to the powers of this world; the confines over which he vaults in
defying the Divine prohibitions are always the confines of Eden.

23 The celebrated Encyclical of December 8, 1864, which promulgated the
Syllabus.

17

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

XIV

Such being the case in the sight of God, I deny to the Christian — to
him who is bound to obey — the right to authorize disobedience to
represent him. I deny him not only the right to create, but even the right
to accept without protest, a power that sets itself up independently of
God.

Liberal Catholicism denies that the civil power can be Christian; I
deny that it can with impunity be anything else and that we can with
impunity dispense ourselves from doing all our religion commands and
commends in order to keep it Christian or to make it become Christian.

The power, which is not Christian and which is without other
religion, is diabolical, it is theocracy in reverse. If we are forced to
submit to such a misfortune and such a shame, it will be an even greater
misfortune and shame for the world than it is for us. We, by the grace of
God, will deliver ourselves from it, and we alone have the power to
deliver the world from it. But to work for it, to build up with our own
hands a government godless on principle, to hold as sacred this
preposterous and vile thing, that would be treason against mankind.
Humanity would call us to account for it before the tribunal of God. It
would accuse us of having extinguished the lamp, of having been
accomplices of the darkness in which death resides.

Methinks I hear Tertullian speaking to the Christian maker of idols:
“Can you preach one only God, you who make of Him so many? Can you
preach the true God, you who make of Him counterfeits? — I make
them, you will say, I do not adore them. — The same reason that forbids
you to adore them likewise forbids you to make them: in both cases it is
the offense it gives to God. But you do adore them, you who make it
possible for them to be adored. You do adore them and sacrifice to them
your life and your soul; you immolate to them your genius, you offer in
libation to them your sweat; for them you enkindle the torch of your
thought. You are to them more than a priest, it is your work that gives
them their divinity!” 24

XV

It is true that Liberalism proclaims the contrary. The lamp, it says,
will shine all the more brightly, and it is then that it will succeed in
piercing the darkness. Once we have become toned-down Catholics,

24 De Idolatria, VI.

18

Louis Veuillot

modified Catholics, in short, new Catholics, we shall convert the world.
In dilating on that point, liberal Catholics are inexhaustible. This
illusion sets their minds at ease regarding the misgivings of their hearts;
they hug it, and the eloquence with which they hold forth on the subject
betrays the ravenousness of their Esau’s appetite — of their craving for
the mess of pottage. Unfortunately for them, the seductive picture of the
conquests religion may be expected to achieve as a result of co-
operation on the part of the liberal mind, is spoiled by a remembrance
all too hard to forget.

At the beginning of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Tempter
drew nigh to where Jesus had retired in the desert, and perceiving that
He was tormented by hunger, said to Him: “Command that these stones
be made bread.” Jesus answered him: “Not in bread alone doth man
live, but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.” Then
the Tempter took Him up and set him upon the pinnacle of the Temple
and said to Him: “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down, for it is
written that He hath given His angels charge over thee, and in their
hands shall they bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a
stone.” Jesus answered him: “It is written too, Thou shalt not tempt the
Lord thy God.” The Tempter made a last effort, and gave away his
secret. He took the Savior up into a very high mountain, and showed
Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them — “All these,”
said he, “will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me.” Jesus
answered him: “Begone. It is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou
adore, and him only shalt thou serve.” Satan withdrew, and at the same
time angels came and ministered to Jesus. 2s

Finally, Liberalism utters its last word: I control the world and I will
give you the world . . .

But it always imposes the selfsame condition: If, falling down, thou
wilt adore me. Descend to, fall to, grovel on, the plane of equality with
those who have no God, and defer to the people of means whom I shall
commit to your charge after they have been put under oath never to
cross the threshold of a place of prayer: then you will see how the world
will honor you and listen to you, and how Jerusalem will be born anew
more beautiful than before.

“The king of nothing,” said Saint Gregory VII, “promises to fill our
hands. Thus do certain princes of the Earth, who are not assured of so
much as a single day, dare to speak to the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They
say: We will give you the power, the glory, the riches, if you recognize

25 Matth. ch. IV.

19

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

our supremacy, if you make us your God; if, falling down at our feet,
you will adore us.”

How often has this form of seduction been tried! To the Popes whom
he persecuted, Frederick of Germany promised a vast development of
the Faith; Cavour thought to trap Pius IX by means of this mirage; the
Parliament of Florence, multiplying insults and robberies, rehashed the
same old argument — mockery mingled with stupidity. None of them
ever makes the least variation on the original theme: To leave the camp
of Israel, to quit the sterile Rock of Rome, to close the ear to the
responses of this sacred Ark that never utters new oracles; finally, to fall
down, to adore the Liar and to believe him alone!

XVI

What a horrible thing and what a horrible farce! It is to the people of
Christ that the proposal is made to accept, to choose for their civil rulers
ignoramuses who know not that Jesus Christ is God, or blackguards
who know it, yet pledge themselves to govern as if they knew it not. And
divine blessings are promised to the men and the societies that are
capable of this folly and this baseness! This is not what the Holy Ghost
tells them. The children of Israel, having consecrated themselves to
Beelphegor, God said to Moses: “Take all the princes of the people, and
hang them up on gibbets against the sun: that my fury may be turned
away from Israel.” 26 There you have a note to enter in the annals of
freedom of worship — of religious liberty. It is said besides that “justice
exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable.” 2? What does
Liberalism make out of this oracle? Does it declare it repealed or is it
minded to pretend that the justice in question here is the impracticable
art of preserving just the right balance between Jesus, Luther, Mahomet
and Joe Smith,28 between God and Belial? Jesus wants no such
equilibrium: “He that is not with me, is against me.” 29

“Know, Emperor, wrote St. Gregory the Great, know that power has
been given you from on high, in order that virtue may be aided, that the
ways of heaven may be widened, and that the empire of Earth may serve
the empire of Heaven.” This is Bossuet’s translation.

26 Numbers, 25:4.

27 Proverbs, 14:34.

28 Founder of the American sect of the Mormons.

29 Matth., 12:30.

20

Louis Veuillot

But, undeniably, these are old sayings and old divine ideas. To begin
with, the world has changed, and when all is said and done, one has to
follow the current.

XVII

“To follow the current,” this is what all these famous discoveries and
grand airs of Catholic liberalism come to in the end!

And why, pray, have we to follow the current? We were born, we were
baptized, we were confirmed precisely in order to swim against the
current. This current of the creature’s ignorance and crime, this current
of falsehood and sin, this turbid current that bears men down to
perdition, is just what we ought to breast and labor to dry up. Beyond
that we have nothing really important to do in the world.

Our history is the record of God’s triumph, through truth disarmed of
all the weapons of human statecraft so far as the world and its rulers
were concerned. The pagans were liberals. They were very desirous of
coming to terms with the Church. They asked of her only to demean her
Christ a little, demoting Him to the rank of a particular divinity. Then
religious worship would have been free; Jesus would have had temples
like Orpheus and like Aesculapius, and the pagans themselves would
have recognized His superior philosophy and would have adored Him.

In negotiating this adjustment, and with a view to helping things
along, the public authority, egged on by the philosophers, the men of
letters, the Jews, the astrologers and the apostates, persecuted the
Christians. It came to such a pass, in the provinces, that the persecution
arrested at one fell swoop an entire Church. The bishop, the clergy, the
faithful, the children, the neophytes were dragged before the proconsul.
Frequently the proconsul begged them to dissemble at least for the sake
of enabling him to acquit them; he demanded of them nothing more
than a sign. Those Christians did not deliberate, they did not say: What
will become of the Church and who will serve God if we die? They
confessed the One God and they died. That was the way they caused the
blade to fall from the hands of the executioner, took the sword out of
the hands of the Emperor, and rescued mankind from the abyss. And
what they had affirmed when persecuted, they did not deny when
victorious. They had affirmed the royalty of the Christ, they established
that, and so the cross of the Labarum came to dominate the imperial
crown itself.

The Fallen One, the grand artisan of heresy, is called Satan,
Adversarius; the adversary of the right, the true, the good; and whatever

21

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

he proposes is the thing we ought not to accept. As of yore he proposed
absorption, so now, with the same intent, by like means, by the same
hostile and lying organs, at one time threatening, at another time
seducing, he proposes separation. He said to the first Christians: Give
up liberty, enter into the empire. He says to us to-day: Give up the
empire, enter into liberty. Formerly: Join; nowadays: Separate.
Formerly, a union that would have degraded the Church; nowadays a
separation that would degrade society. Neither would that union have
been befitting then, because it would have meant absorption; nor would
this separation be a good thing now, because it would mean
repudiation. The Church does not repudiate human society, nor does
she wish to be repudiated by it. She has not lowered her dignity, she will
not abdicate her right, that is only another way of saying, her royal
liberty. To rob the crown of the cross and the cross of the crown is to act
in the interest of the Adversary, not in the interest of society.

XVIII

The Christians despoiled pagan society of its weapons and its temples
to transform them, not to destroy them. From the temple, they expelled
the idol; upon might they imposed right. The foolish idea of abolishing
force never even came to them. Force allowed itself to be transposed,
allowed itself to be disciplined; allowed itself to be sanctified. Who is so
rash as to think he can abolish might? and why, after all, should anyone
wish to abolish it at all? Might is a very good thing; it is a gift of God,
nay, a very attribute of God: I am the most mighty God of thy fathers0

As right is of itself a force, so force can be of itself a right. Mankind
and the Church recognize a right of war. From the iron of which it
despoiled barbarous force, Christianity made coats of mail for the weak
and noble swords with which it armed the right. Force in the hands of
the Church is the force of right, and we have no desire that right should
remain without force. Force in its proper place and doing its duty, that
is the orderly way.

Because in the present world force is not everywhere in its proper
place, that is to say at the disposition of the Church; because often, far
from serving right, it is abused against the right, shall we therefore say
yes to the Illuminati, some of whom decree the outright abolition of
force, while the rest ordain that the supreme right shall never have force

3° Genesis, 46:3.

22

Louis Veuillot

at its disposal, for fear it might hamper the liberty that wants to destroy
the truth?

We ought, on the contrary, to be ready to shed our blood in order to
restore force to its lawful function, in order to attach it exclusively to
the service of right.

Force ought to protect, to affirm, to vindicate the grandest, the
noblest, the most necessary right of man, which is to acknowledge and
to serve God; it should enable the Church to extend to every man on
Earth the benefit of this right. Let us never relinquish this right which
liberal Catholicism surrenders, so that it can drift down the current,
along with the crowd.

23

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

XIX

This suggestion to follow the current is an unworthy one, one
repugnant even to an elementary human sense of honor. Verily it is a
sad reflection on our times that such a proposal can be made to men
who have been signed with the Holy Chrism! Imagine a king driven
from his throne, the forlorn hope of his conquered country, imagine
such a one all of a sudden demeaning himself so low as to declare that
he considered himself to have been justly dethroned and that all he
asked for was to enjoy the status of a private individual, on the basis of
the common right, under the protection of the despoilers of his people:
think of the supineness of such a wretch! Nevertheless, his baseness
would be as nothing compared with that to which we are asked to stoop.

This imaginary king would be guilty of an uncalled-for abasement.
One would prefer not to believe him. Those to whom he made the offer
to sell his rights and his honor would say to him: Fiddlesticks! You a
king?

We would be doing something still more shameful, and for this
reason people would be even less inclined to believe us. I may add that
they would have the best of reasons for not believing us. For as was the
case in former times with the jurors of the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy, we, too, would come to have our quota of repenters and
retractors. Now, those who had remained Catholics pure and simple or
who had become so again, would have their doubts about the sincerity
of the ones who preferred to remain liberal Catholics. And then what
stand would the latter take between the orthodox hurling anathemas at
them and the unbelievers demanding of them guarantees? This is an
eventuality they will most certainly have to face. If the liberal Catholics
rejoin the faithful and accept the Church’s teaching in her assertion of
rights over the whole world, they will have accomplished absolutely
nothing. If, on the other hand, they give the guarantees demanded of
them by the opposing camp, they decisively cut themselves off and will
soon find out that Liberty imposes silence upon dissenters, they will be
forced to lend a hand in persecution, becoming at once apostates of the
Church and apostates of Liberty.

They can count on it that they will not escape the one or the other of
these alternatives:

Repentant liberals — or impenitent Catholics.

24

Louis Veuillot

XX

I shall make a hypothesis. I shall suppose all of us to be following the
current. I say all, except the Pope, for that far the hypothesis may not
go. What will be the result? There will be one force gone from the world.
What force? Ah! — it will not be the force of barbarism or of brutality.

The force that will be lost to the world is the force by which it has
pleased God to conquer the world, and the world up to now is still
conquered by it. God triumphs through a small number of faithful; this
small number, the little flock, to whom He said: “Fear not!”; this small
number He has called the salt of the earth — If the salt lose its savor,
wherewith shall it be salted?

O prophetic wisdom of the word divine! the grain of sand is God’s
sentinel upon the strand and says to the Ocean: No further! That grain
of sand is the strength of mountains and the fertility of plains.

We turn towards the Crucified of Jerusalem, towards the Crucified of
Rome, to His truth forsaken and betrayed; we say to Him: I believe
Thee, I adore Thee, I want to be trampled under foot like Thee, turned
into an object of derision like Thee; I want to die with Thee! . . . We say
that, and the world is conquered.

In no other way will it ever be conquered, in no other way will we
ever be able to despoil it of its weapons, to the end of transfiguring
them and sanctifying them in ourselves and in their employment to
block every way of blasphemy and to level every obstacle interposed
between the little ones of this world and everlasting truth.

For it is necessary that every man should know and pronounce these
words, this Credo which alone can redeem the world, this “Thy kingdom
come” which implores eternal peace.

XXI

The first great word of liberty that was ever pronounced, the first
great act of liberty that mankind ever saw done, was when those two
poor Jews, Peter and John, proclaimed the duty of obeying God rather
than men, and went on teaching what error and persecution, under the
masks of justice and prudence, would have liked to suppress. 31 Whoever
follows their example is free, free from false judges, free from false
thinkers; he enters into the impregnable citadel; his thought, set free

3! Acts, 4:19-20.

25

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

from cringing terrors, is subtracted from the empire of death; it
provides a refuge from slavery for all whom it is able to persuade.

But there are two things to be noted.

In the first place, this act of liberty which the Apostles made towards
the powers of Earth is at the same time a great homage of submission
towards God, and they were so strong against the world only because
they were obedient to God.

In a discourse held at Malines,32 an eloquent discourse, greatly
celebrated among the Liberal Catholics, liberty of conscience was traced
back to this first and famous non possumus, it was said to have been
created and promulgated then. But, quite the contrary, according to the
remark of an English publicist, 33 it was that day, it was by that very non
possumus, that the human conscience recognized and accepted the curb
of an unchangeable law. It was not a principle of liberal liberty to which
St. Peter gave utterance: he proclaimed the imperishable, irrevocable
duty imposed by God who made it a matter of obligation to preach His
Revelation. He did not announce to the world the liberal emancipation
of conscience: on the contrary, he put upon conscience the glorious
burden of giving testimony to the truth; he did not emancipate men
from God. Saint Peter could, on God’s behalf, demand of the pagans
liberty for the Christians; he did not give nor did he dream of giving the
Christians the license to put error on the same footing as truth, with the
understanding that they were one day to treat both as equals, or that
truth should ever come to acknowledge error as supreme by divine right
in such and such a domain, provided truth on its part were left supreme
or tolerated in some other domain. For how could such a humiliated
and hobbled truth reply effectively to the countless sophisms of error?

In the second place, the Church alone has the mission to teach this
truth that sets free, this unique truth, and she brings conviction of it
only to souls that are full of Jesus Christ.

Wherever Jesus Christ is unknown, man obeys man and obeys him
absolutely. Wherever the knowledge of Jesus Christ is obliterated, truth
declines, liberty goes into eclipse, the old tyranny comes back and
retrieves its former frontiers. When the Church is no longer able to
teach Jesus Christ, whole and entire, when the people no longer
understand that we must obey God rather than men, when no voice is

32 Discourse of Montalembert to the General Assembly of the Catholics of Belgium in
1863. In it the great orator spoke on two particularly burning subjects: the growing
progress of democracy and the relations of Church and State.

33 The Relations of Christianity with Civil Society, by Edward Lucas, discourse delivered
before the Catholic Academy of London and published by Archbishop Manning. (Note of
L. Veuillot .)

26

Louis Veuillot

raised any more to confess the truth, without disguising it or paring it
down, then indeed will liberty have vanished from the Earth and human
history be at an end.

XXII

Nevertheless, so long as one single man of perfect faith remains, he
will be free from the universal yoke, and he will hold in his hands his
own destiny and that of the world. The world will then exist solely for
the sanctification of that one last man. And were that last man to
apostatize, too, were he, likewise, to say to Antichrist, not that he was
right in persecuting the Church, but simply that he was justified in
withholding the use of his power to enable God to reign through the
Church, the apostate would be thereby pronouncing his own doom and
that of the whole world as well. For inasmuch as the Earth no longer
paid to divine truth its due of homage and adoration, God would take
away from it His sun, and in default of the counterpoise of obedience
and prayer, its blasphemy would cease to mount heavenward, it would
perish instantly. Of its own accord it would drop back into the abyss.

But the last word of the Church militant will not be one of apostasy. I
picture to myself the last Christian standing before the supreme
Antichrist, at the end of those terrible days, when the insolence of man
will stupidly rejoice at having seen the stars fall from Heaven. They will
drag him in bound, amid the jeers of that scum of Cain and Judas which
will still go by the name of the human race — and it will, in fact, still be
the human race, the human race arrived at the zenith of science, sunk to
the nadir of moral degradation.

The angels will salute the only star that has not fallen, and Antichrist
will gaze upon the only man alive who refuses to adore the lie and say
that Evil is Good. He will still hope to seduce him; he will ask this
Christian how he wishes to be treated. What think you that Christian
will answer, and what other answer can he make except: “Like a king”?
Last of the faithful, last priest, it is he who is indeed King. His is all the
heritage of Abraham, his all the heritage of the Christ. In his shackled
hands, he holds the keys to unlock eternal life; he can confer baptism,
he can give absolution, he can administer the Eucharist; the one he
faces can give nothing but death. He is King! And I defy even Antichrist,
for all his power, to treat him otherwise than as king, because in fine the
very dungeon is for him an empire and the gibbet itself a throne.

To whoever asks them the same question, Catholics should give that
same answer. Modern liberalism wants the Church’s children to confer

27

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

consecration on its unhallowed self and so it speaks to them as the
Saracen king spoke to Louis of France: “If you wish your life spared,
make me a knight.”

The saintly prisoner replied: “Make yourself a Christian.”

XXIII

Two powers are at war in our modern world: the Revelation and the
Revolution. These powers are incompatible with each other, that is what
the whole thing comes to.

The war between them has given rise to three parties:

(1) The party of Revelation, or the party of Christianity. The Catholic
party is its head, so high above current ignorances and meannesses,
that it might well seem to have no body at all; but, in spite of that, this
body, often well-nigh invisible, does exist and is in reality the most
powerful one on Earth, because, regardless of number, it alone
possesses in very truth that unique superhuman force which is called
the Faith.

(2) The Revolutionary party: the schools termed liberal are nothing
but protean masks and the term itself is elastic and dishonest.

(3) The Third Party: it professes to take the other two in hand and
force them to compose their differences.

The Third Party terms itself Eclecticism, but it is really
Confusionism, that is to say, Futilitarianism.

By the very fact that the Third Party espouses the Revolution, it
denies Christianity, of which the Revolution is the absolute
contradiction and the precise negation. By the very fact that the
Catholic party is the affirmation of Christian truth, it denies the
Revolution, which is the antichristian lie; it denies both Liberalism and
Eclecticism, which are, in most cases, nothing but the glossing over of
that lie and, in a few cases, the upshot of being duped by its hoaxes. The
Catholic party rejects them all. We reject them as our fathers rejected
idolatry, heresy and schism; we reject them, even if we have to perish
for it. We do so knowing that even if we do perish in this conflict, we
shall not be defeated.

It is under the banner of the Third Party, under the auspices of its
confusion and futility, that liberal Catholicism announces its would-be
conciliatory compromises, which meet with a bad reception from both
sides, being frequently repulsed with positive derision. The Catholics,
who have their dogmatic conception and their historical practice of

28

Louis Veuillot

liberty, will have nothing to do with its schemes, complicated and cock-
eyed as they are on no end of counts; the revolutionaries, the liberals
and the eclectics, who pretend to share their Christianity, remand the
Third Party to their own Church, whose yoke they have not altogether
shaken off. They remind the latter that their Church does not allow such
fraternization, that she even warns them to be on their guard against it.
They give them to understand that the Church of the latter is not theirs;
that into theirs no Christians may enter except by the gate of outright
apostasy.

XXIV

It is a sad thing to see deserving men, men who have done great
things, striving might and main to disseminate among Catholics
doctrines that the faithful reject as hostile to the rights and dignity of
the Church, when all the while the adversaries and enemies of the
Church consistently snub them as being still too much imbued with the
Christian spirit. Their formulas, inspired by the spirit of compromise
that effaces all boundary-lines, meet everywhere with the same rebuff.
They speak of the independence of the Church: that word alone is too
much for the revolutionaries, and these enjoin upon them to strike it
out; and when they speak, at the same time, from another angle, of the
independence of the State, the Catholics notice that under cover of this
word, by the very force of facts, they subordinate the Church to the civil
power and make the material existence of Christianity dependent upon
the benevolence of its enemies who, under all circumstances, show
themselves not only indifferent to it but hostile, not only hostile but
furious. It is always a question of reconciling the irreconcilable, of
obtaining for the Church a favor that those in power are unwilling to
grant, of making favors to the Church depend upon conditions that she
cannot possibly accept. No wealth of eloquence can hide for long this
depth of incurable misery, no words in any language have elasticity
enough to harmonize or hold together such contradictions: Free co-
operation, reciprocal independence of the two powers, and so forth.
What is the meaning of that high-sounding cant? What follows
practically from the “free co-operation” of the soul and the body, from
the “reciprocal independence” of the material and the spiritual?

There are other phrases which are still more unfortunate, in that they
have an import far more clear. The proposal made to the Church to
relinquish all privilege is one of these sayings that do open violence to
Catholic sentiment.

29

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

In point of fact, the Church has a Divine constitution, she lives by her
own right, and not by virtue of privilege. Who, then, could possibly
grant her a privilege that does not already belong to her from the very
nature of things? The State? If so, then civil society is superior to
religious society and has the power to take back from the latter
whatever it has condescendingly granted. 34 History, in accord with
Christian good sense, condemns the false view embalmed in this
language. The Church was not made by the State; it was she, on the
contrary, that made the State and society; and neither the State nor
society ever granted any privileges to the Church; they recognized in her
a status antedating their own existence, a right that did not in any sense
emanate from them and which they could not modify except by way of
an abuse against which the public interest obliged her to protest.

We cannot chime in with the revolutionary ignorance or ingratitude
which is at pains to hide this fact. We know that the Church became
great in spite of pagan power, that she changed the face of the world,
that she is, in a word, the mother and the founder of Christian States
and that the superiority of European civilization is the result of her
principles and will forever be dependent thereon. We know, too, that
the Church could not have accomplished this sublime work, could not
have defended it and could not have continued it, were it not for this
constitution of hers given her by God, so that she might function in the
world in her twofold capacity of Mother and Queen, mistress of the
human race alike through her love, through her light and through her
authority. And we of to-day dare to characterize the already much too
restricted expressions of her maternal and royal supremacy by the
ignoble designation of privileges, of human concessions that she ought,
after all, to renounce!

The Church, at any rate, has far more right to renounce them than
has society to abolish them, for society cannot be under any
misapprehension as to where they came from and what purpose they
are intended to serve. In the presence of the unbelieving or the heretical
State, she may forego for a time the exercise of her Divine prerogative;
she cannot proclaim that she has renounced it, that she repudiates as
evil and superfluous what has been not only conferred, but imposed by
God for the good of the world. When the Church concludes a concordat,
she does not conduct herself as a subordinate, but as a superior; it is she

34 Elsewhere ( Univers , Dec. 2, 1851) L. Veuillot has well said: “The role of
the Church in this world is not to die for governments, but to live in peace
with them and to survive them, helping them to lead their peoples and
exhorting them to procure their salvation.”

30

Louis Veuillot

who grants; she does not receive privileges, she accords them. She
accords them with regret, for though she thereby wards off a greater
evil, experience proves only too well that concessions of this sort are not
at all conducive to the common good, that nothing which tends to
weaken the Christian sentiment can possibly redound to the advantage
of anybody.

The argument against principles that liberalism seeks to draw from
these concessions is unworthy of the reasoning powers of a Christian. In
the first place, the Church makes no concession at all on the matter of
principles, she signs no treaties in which she does not make
reservations as to these. In the second place, being exposed to the blows
inflicted by brute force and having no weapons of her own beyond her
patience, the Church, according to the profound observation of Joseph
de Maistre, “does not refuse to the sovereignty which insists upon it
anything that is not bound to create difficulties.”

XXV

The doctors of Catholic liberalism flatter themselves that they explain
the famous slogan: “The Church free, in a free State,” in saying that by
this they mean “the freedom of the Church founded upon the public
liberties.”

That was not the way our forefathers looked at the matter. In
promoting the liberties of the Church, as Cardinal Wiseman observes,
they believed themselves to be promoting the progress of civil liberties;
there is scarcely a charter that does not base its system of emancipation
upon the liberty of the Church and the unlimited exercise of her rights.
Are we to invert the ancient order of things, and instead of grounding
these public liberties upon the Christian social order, make political
liberty the foundation of religious liberty? That would be to base the
unchangeable upon the changeable. Let us be on our guard against
accustoming a whole generation to tolerate ambiguity in matters of vital
importance. By praising so extravagantly the fairness with which our
enemies are minded to apply certain untenable principles, we are giving
our youth anything but the right preparation to fight the good fight and
to face persecution.

The contention that the Church can only be free in the bosom of
general liberty is ambiguous. But what else can it be intended to convey
except that the Church’s liberty depends upon extrinsic causes? And yet
the Christian society, existing as it does by the Divine will, and having
for its head Jesus Christ, who has guaranteed it an imperishable

31

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

duration, must of necessity be free by virtue of its very nature or
essence; and this liberty it imparts to every society on which it exerts
influence, permeating the latter with its own spirit, like leaven in dough,
like the soul in the body.

It is inconceivable that slavery could exist in any society where the
Church is truly free; while a society that allows the Church to be bound,
will, however free it may appear to be, live to see itself bound hand and
foot and, though libertine, will not be really at liberty. The police license
many things that responsible liberty would forbid, or rather, refrain
from doing, but the licenses given by the police should not be
confounded with liberty; they are not and never will be liberty. In a
society which restricts the liberty of the Church, the individual will,
perhaps, be free to do whatever he wants with his body, and will want to
do with it, we may be sure, nothing good; but he will no longer be able
to call his soul his own, and presently not even charge of his body will
be left to him.

To say that the Church cannot be free, except in the bosom of general
liberty, is the same as saying that she cannot be free except on condition
of seeing arrayed against her full liberty to give her the lie and to attack
her with all the legalized weapons and tactics of offense that such an
order of things would put in the hands of her enemies. And inasmuch as
it is urged upon her, over and above all this, to relinquish her
“privileges” — without which there would have been no such thing as
general liberty at all — it follows that she would thus lose the power to
impose upon men that interior restraint by virtue of which they become
fit for liberty and feel themselves worthy of it. After that, as night
follows day, political restraint will increase, and soon the evil hour will
be at hand when society shall hear Caesar, with the consent of the
“general liberty,” declare himself once more pontiff and god: Divus
Caesar, imperator et summus pontifex — “Divine Caesar, Emperor and
Supreme Pontiff.”

And thus, thanks to the “general liberty” and its invariable corollary,
the “suppression of privilege,” religion will come to occupy an even
lower position in the world than the one it holds at present.

XXVI

Such is the affinity of one error for another and so inevitable is the
drift of particular errors towards the general error, that we see liberal
Catholicism, for all its truculent pose of independence, tend
spontaneously towards Caesarism just as the Revolution did. And it is in

32

Louis Veuillot

the name of liberty of conscience that men are verging toward this
wholesale subjugation of the human conscience! The principles of
Christianity must be brought into conformity with those of modern
society; modern society demands this, so there is nothing left for us but
to fall into line, to accept all its conditions, to do away with whatever
displeases it, to protest against any return to the ideas it no longer likes.
But what of those who find modern society to be in the wrong; who
think that this capricious, not to say fantastic, personage puts forward
sinful and insufferable pretensions? . . . Such persons, be their dignity
or their number what it may, will have to knuckle down, to disappear
from a world whom their presence annoys. Liberal society, emancipated
humanity does not propose to put up with their opposition any longer.
The thing to do is to rush pell-mell into that unity in reverse with which
Liberalism fondly hopes to frustrate the realization of the unity the
Divine Shepherd desires; the thing to do is to accept the unity of Hell,
which proposes to place the flock exclusively under the pastoral crook of
Caesar! Evidently, the doctors of liberal Catholicism, following the lead
of the other doctors of the Revolution, entertain the notion that one and
the same mode of life can and should be set up in all European States.
As for the differences of race, of religions and political traditions that
will have to be demolished and razed in order to bring about such a
standardization, they give no thought to them whatever; modern society
demands this sacrifice, shall liberty of conscience refuse to make it?
Isn’t it imperative to go with the stream, to keep in step with “modern
society,” to save the liberty of perdition?

XXVII

As I pen these lines, the newspapers report the message of Pius IX.
His words are fraught at once with sadness, with light and with
firmness, and they have a bearing on the subject of my reflections. I
interrupt my writing to listen with the respect and love we owe to the
Father of Christians.

The Holy Father says that he deplores and condemns the
usurpations, the increasing immorality, the hatred towards religion and
the Church. He adds this solemn warning:

But even in deploring and condemning, I do not forget the
words of Him whose representative on Earth I am, and who, in
the garden of His agony and on the Cross of His sufferings,
raised towards Heaven His dying eyes and said: Father, forgive

33

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

them, for they know not what they do! I, too, in the face of the
enemies of the Holy See and of the Catholic doctrine itself,
repeat: Father, forgive them, for they know not . . .

There are two classes of men opposed to the Church. The
first comprises certain Catholics who respect her and love her,
but who criticize whatever emanates from her. They would fain,
as one Catholic thinker remarks, reform all the canons of the
Church from the Council of Nicaea up to the Council of Trent.
From the decree of Pope Gelasius on the Sacred Books up to the
bull defining the Immaculate Conception, they find it needful to
revamp everything, to revise everything. They are Catholics,
they claim to be our friends, but they forget the respect they
owe to the authority of the Church. If they do not take care, if
they do not come back promptly to their own side, I fear that
they will lose their footing on that inclined plane and plunge
into the abyss into which the second class of our adversaries
have already fallen.

The latter are the more outspoken and the more dangerous.
They consist of philosophers, of all those who desire to attain
truth and justice with no other resource than their own unaided
reason. But they only succeed in verifying of themselves what
the Apostle of the gentiles, St. Paul, said eighteen centuries ago:
Ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth.
They search and search, and though the truth seems ever to
elude them, they are always hoping to find it and to announce to
us a new era wherein the human mind will by itself dissipate all
darkness.

Pray for these misguided men, you who do not share their
errors. You are indeed the disciples of Him who said: I am the
way, the truth and the life. You know, too, that the world has
not been called to interpret His Divine word, that it does not
belong to the philosophers to explain His doctrine, but only to
His ministers to whom He gave the mission to teach in saying to
them: He that heareth you, heareth me; when you speak to men,
it is My voice that they will hear.” 35

XXVIII

It would be no use to go on with these remarks, unless we paused to
consider that vague monster which people call “modern society,” to
inquire whether it really demands all it is said to demand, and whether

35 Reply of the Holy Father to the address of the faithful of different
nations gathered at Rome, the 17th of March, 1866. (Note ofL. Veujilot.)

34

Louis Veuillot

its material force, quite a different thing from its intellectual force, is so
considerable and preponderant as it is made out to be. Good grounds,
grounds of fact are not wanting on which to contest the depth of this
torrent, for all its noise and violence. We know quite well, we fully
understand that it threatens to sweep away the Church and all who dare
to defend her integrity. For my part, however, I am inclined to believe
that modern society, both in France and in other countries, still
contains a sound core of Catholicity, perfect and pure, and that Europe,
underneath a layer that has perhaps more of froth to it than solidity, is
by no means disposed to abandon Christianity. To me it is incredible
that the political, literary, and artistic groups, by whom dethronement
of Christ and His law has been decreed, are more deeply rooted in the
soil of France and more representative of the national genius than our
numerous and glorious clergy, those countless enterprises of charity,
that generous and inexhaustible zeal which covers the land with its
benefits and memorials. To offset this the scandalous success of a book
or of an anti-Christian journal may be urged by way of objection: this
success is without doubt deplorable; yet it falls short of being an
unanswerable argument. In the years 1864 and 1865, more churches
were built in France than there were editions published of the
blasphemous books of M. Renans6 the churches still send up their
spires crowned by the cross; the work of the blasphemer has fallen
down for good, trampled in the dust under the heedless feet of the
faithful. And who in the world has any doubt as to which would cause
the greater commotion, the suppression, for instance, of the Siecle, or
the imprisonment for a religious act of the bishop in whose diocese the
Siecle has the largest number of readers!

At the beginning of the present century, Joseph de Maistre wrote:
“There is in the natural government and in the national ideas of the
French people I know not what theocratic and religious element that is
forever cropping up.”

But I do not care to insist on this point, which is of no consequence
so far as the duty of Catholics is concerned. Let us assume that things
have come to the worst; let us credit the irreligious torrent with all the
power it boasts of having, and grant that its might is capable of
sweeping us away: All right, the torrent will sweep us away! That is a
small matter, so long as it does not sweep away the truth. We shall be
swept away and we shall leave the truth behind, just as those have done
who were swept away before us. Despite the torrent, we will hold fast to
the truth; come what may, we will cling to this truth which is always

36 Renan’s La Vie de Jesus (“The Life of Jesus”) which appeared in 1863.

35

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

new. We came to this land that is called arid. We have known its youth
and its fertility. If only our works avail to disseminate the fructifying
salt and to augment that grain of sand which sets a limit to the sea; as
our fathers preserved this refuge, we, too, will preserve it for
generations yet unborn. The world either has a future or it has none. If
the end of time is close at hand, then there is nothing left for us but to
build for eternity; if long centuries lie ahead, then, in building for
eternity, we shall also be building for the time. In the face of fire and
sword, in the face of contempt and humiliation, let us be brave
witnesses of God’s own truth, and our testimony will stand. There is a
vegetation that sprouts up unconquerably under the hand of the
Heavenly Father. Wherever the seed is planted, a tree strikes root;
wherever the martyr has left a bone of his body, there a church springs
up. Thus are formed the obstacles that divide and dam up torrents. In
these days of sterility, at a distance of fifteen centuries, we still live on
the store of grain accumulated in the catacombs.

XXIX

The revolutionary sphinx, under the name of the modern mind,
propounds a series of riddles with which the liberal Catholics occupy
themselves a great deal more than befits the dignity of children of
Christ. Not one of them, however, answers the riddle in a way calculated
to satisfy either the sphinx, or themselves, or anybody else, and it is a
matter of record, that the monster devours soonest just those who
flatter themselves on having guessed its meaning best.

Scant is the self-respect and scant the faith that remains in these last!
They come, not without arrogance, to ask, in the name of the sphinx and
in their own name, how “intolerant” Catholics can get around the
“conquests” of the dissenting mind with its rights of man, its liberty of
religions, its constitutions grounded on these principles, etc., etc.
Nothing could be easier to answer.

To begin with, the dissenting mind invariably starts off with an
unwarranted assumption of its own superiority, which we flatly refuse
to recognize. Error is never the equal, much less the superior, of truth,
neither can it hope to overawe truth, or ever to prevail legitimately
against it, and, by consequence, the disciples of error, infidels,
unbelievers, atheists, renegades and the like, are never the superiors
nor even the legitimate equals of the disciples of Jesus Christ, the one
true God. From the standpoint of unalterable right, the perfect society
that constitutes the Church of Christ is by no means on a level with the
gang that collects around error. We know right well to whom it has been
said: Going therefore, teach — a word, we may remark in passing, like

36

Louis Veuillot

the great Increase and multiply, which was spoken at the beginning of
things; and these two words are living words despite the ruses and
triumphs of death — error has nothing to teach by divine right, neither
has it the divine right to increase and multiply. Truth is at liberty to
tolerate error, but error is obliged to grant to truth the right of liberty.

In the second place, now that the partisans of error have gotten the
upper hand and have enthroned in the world certain sham principles
that are the negation of truth and therefore the destruction of order, we
leave to them these false principles until they swallow them and die of
them, while we hang on to our truths by which we live.

In the third place, when the time comes and men realize that the
social edifice must be rebuilt according to eternal standards, be it to-
morrow, or be it centuries from now, the Catholics will arrange things
to suit said standards. Undeterred by those who prefer to abide in
death, they will re-establish certain laws of life. They will restore Jesus
to His place on high, and He shall be no longer insulted. They will raise
their children to know God and to honor their parents. They will uphold
the indissolubility of marriage, and if this fails to meet with the
approval of the dissenters, it will not fail to meet with the approval of
their children. They will make obligatory the religious observance of
Sunday on behalf of the whole of society and for its own good, revoking
the permit for free-thinkers and Jews to celebrate, incognito, Monday
or Saturday on their own account. Those whom this may annoy will
have to put up with the annoyance. Respect will not be refused to the
Creator nor repose denied to the creature simply for the sake of
humoring certain maniacs, whose frenetic condition causes them
stupidly and insolently to block the will of a whole people. However,
like our own, their houses will be all the more solid and their fields all
the more fertile on that account.

In a word, Catholic society will be Catholic, and the dissenters whom
it will tolerate will know its charity, but they will not be allowed to
disrupt its unity.

This is the answer that Catholics can, on their part, make to the
sphinx; and these are the words that will kill it outright. The sphinx is
not invulnerable; against it we have just what is required in the way of
weapons. The Archangel did not overcome the Rebel with material
weapons, but with this word: Who is like unto God! And Satan fell,
struck as by a bolt of lightning.

37

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

XXX

To sum up, the liberal Catholic party accepts the separation of civil
society from the society of Jesus Christ. The separation of the two is in
their eyes a good thing and they desire it to be definitive. They believe
that as a result the Church will gain peace, and, eventually, even a great
triumph. Nevertheless, the prospects of triumph are mentioned to the
“intolerant” Catholics alone, and to the latter only in undertones. Let us
stick to the peace: can we hope for such a result?

For one thing, this liberal church, a church altogether “of its time,” in
order to clear itself of all reasonable suspicion of being obedient to
Rome, will have to stop irritating or frightening those generous souls
who are resolved, come what may, to cauterize “the Pontifical cancer.”
After that, seeing that the Catholics would have thus become
indistinguishable from the rest of the world, why should they not enjoy
the benefit of contempt! They will be despised, they will live in peace;
they can attend to their religion just as they attend to their other affairs:
the Siecle will have no more occasion to hurl the epithet “clerical” at the
parishioner of St. Sulpice than it would at the emancipated sheep of
Pastor Coquerel.37

To be nothing, utterly nothing in order to live at peace with all the
world, such a hope might seem to be rather modest! Nevertheless, it is
hoping too much. Even were the liberal Catholics to succeed, either by
way of seduction or by way of pressure, in suppressing the integral
Catholics, I assure them that they will never live to see themselves
despised so much as they aspire to be. A few considerations will serve to
convince them of the solid reasons for this prediction, and to make
them appreciate for themselves the illusion they have come to entertain.

I simply pass over the mad and unheard-of notion of creating an
atheistic government, in the absence of atheists from the very society
that said government is supposed to conduct. I say nothing either about
the hardihood of attempting so completely to alienate peoples from the
equity, the meekness and venerableness of the scepter, as Christianly
conceived, that such rulers as sainted kings should never be seen again.
I waive the disdain certain teachers show for the lessons of history and
religion which condemn governmental indifference to good and evil and
prove such an attitude to be absolutely preposterous. The illusion of the

37 Of the three Pastors Coquerel, who made quite a stir under the Empire,
the one of whom Louis veuillot speaks here is evidently Athanasius
Coquerel, who in consequence of a defense of the Vie ae Jesus was
dismissed with much ado by the Protestant Consistory in 1864.

38

Louis Veuillot

liberal Catholics goes further than that. It has the power not only to
falsify history, the Bible and religion, to discolor with its false hues
human nature itself; it even deprives its victims of their appreciation of
the present as it likewise strips them of their knowledge of the past and
their foresight of the future. They cease to see what really happens, they
no longer hear what is actually said, they no longer know what they
themselves have done; they misread their own hearts as they misread
everything else.

XXXI

If there is one thing evident, it is that the non-Christian liberals, who
are one-hundred-percent revolutionary, have no more use for the liberal
Catholics than they have for the other Catholics. They expressly say so,
they chant it at all times and in all keys; on this subject the Siecle has
made repeated declarations, which leave nothing to the imagination and
which certainly do not suffer from any lack of echoes.

More Christianity? Would that there were no more question of it at
all! That is the Revolution’s cry wherever it is in power. And where in
Europe is it not in power? Not a single revolutionary has protested
against the ferocious howls of Garibaldi, against the more coldly
murderous demands of M. Quinet, urging that Catholicism be
“smothered in the mud,” against the moronic impiety of those blind
partisans who form associations pledged to refuse the sacraments. To
date, on the other hand, no revolutionary nabob has been converted by
the platforms, the advances, the tendernesses, and, alas! it has to be
confessed, the cringings of the liberal Catholics. In vain have they
disowned their brothers, despised the Bulls, explained away or
repudiated the encyclicals: the lengths to which they have gone have
won for them patronizing compliments, humiliating encouragements,
but no alliances. Up to the present the liberal chapel lacks a gate of
entrance, and seems to be nothing more than a gate of exit from the
great Church. The eruption of hate still continues in the non-Christian
liberal camp: it ignites in the midst of the world a conflagration of fury
not only against the Church, but against the very idea of God. The heads
of parties that govern contemporary Europe all vie with one another in
an effort to break off all union between man and God. Among the
schismatics, among the heretics, and lastly among the infidels, however
slight the contact they have with civilization, everywhere the Church is
being despoiled. The Moslem State seizes upon the goods of the
mosques, as the Christian State in its turn confiscates ecclesiastical

39

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

property; the one thing necessary is that God should not, under any
name, under any title, possess a square foot of what He has created.
That is the world in which the liberal Catholics expect to find defenders,
upright and staunch guardians of Catholic liberty!

XXXII

This is not what their own experience should lead them to expect. We
are in a position to speak of that experience; we went through it, too, in
the same endeavor and with the same sentiments.

The experience was prolonged; the time seemed as favorable as the
present day seems unfavorable. Though we were few in number, our
unity made us strong. The constitution then in force made it obligatory
to reckon with us; it afforded us certain advantages for which we were
grateful, it made us certain promises that we wanted to believe and
which were of more concern to us than what it withheld. Who were so
desirous as we that the Charter should turn out to be true, who else gave
it greater support, who else entertained more sincere and ardent hopes
on the strength of it? Though upholding our principles against the
revolutionary doctrine, what in point of fact did we reject? What more
did we demand than the simple right to oppose liberty with liberty?

We did not form an isolated or unimportant party. We had at our
head the princes of the Church, one especially who was as eminent for
his character and talent as he was for his position: it was Bishop de
Langres, who died as head of the see of Arras, beloved of God and
honored of men. Mgr. Parisis studied the question of bringing religion
and liberty into accord, with less of an eye to seeing what the Church
should retain than what concessions it could make. One draft that met
with his approval thus summarizes the platform of the Catholic party:
The Catholics have said “to the princes, to the doctors and to the priests
of modern ideas: We accept your dynasties and your charters; we leave
to you whatever you have won. We ask of you only one thing, which is of
strict right, even in your eyes: liberty. We will contend with you and
convince you on the sole ground of liberty. Cease to subject us to your
monopolies, your restraints and your prohibitions; allow us to teach as
freely as you do; to form associations for the works of God as freely as
you form them for the works of the world; to open up careers for the
whole range of beautiful labors, about which all you seem able to do is
to impose restrictions or to drive hard bargains. And don’t be afraid of

40

Louis Veuillot

our liberty: it will heal and save yours. Wherever we are not free, no one
else is for very long.” 38

That is what we demanded. And, without wishing unduly to praise or
disparage anyone, our adversaries of that day were more serious, more
sincere, more enlightened, more moderate than our adversaries of to-
day. They were the Guizots, the Thiers, the Cousins, the Villemains, the
Broglies, the Salvandys, and their leader, King Louis-Philippe. None of
these heads of the directorate had any of that irreligious and
antichristian fanaticism we have seen so much of since then. Their
subsequent attitude gave honorable proof of this. Moreover, they
honestly believed in liberty, at least, they had the will to believe.

What did we obtain from their wisdom, their moderation, their
sincerity? Alas! the computation is as easy to make as it is painful to
tell: we obtained nothing, absolutely nothing, the result that the
mathematicians call zero.

A catastrophe occurred; fear proved a more efficacious motive than
reason, justice and the Charter. Under the influence of fear, they made
some small concessions to us, but with the ill-disguised design of
curtailing or abolishing these paltry advantages at the earliest
opportunity! The storm blew over. Those of our adversaries who were
toppled over by it showed no conspicuous signs of having been
chastened by the experience; those who managed to weather it seemed
unable to forgive themselves for having been intimidated by the
thunder; in general, they all showed themselves more hostile than one
would ever have imagined.

Did we ourselves, then, change and take away from the modern ideals
the allegiance and practical support we formerly gave them? The liberal
Catholics claim as much, but they gratuitously deceive themselves. We
said it then, we repeat it now, that the philosophical groundwork of
modern constitutions is ruinous, that it exposes society to deadly perils.
We have never said that one could or should resort to violence in order
to change this groundwork, nor that one should not avail himself of
what is guaranteed by these constitutions in cases where it does not
conflict with the laws of God. It is a question of a fact wholly
independent of our own volition, a state of things in which we find
ourselves, in certain respects, like strangers in a foreign land,
conforming to the general laws regulating public life, making use of the
general rights of the community, but never entering the temples to offer
incense. The author of these pages, if it be in order for him to cite his
own case as an illustration, has long made use of the freedom of the

38 Author’s note on Mgr. Parisis.

41

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

press and still insists on enjoying it, without, however, committing
himself thereby, or ever having committed himself, to the belief that
freedom of the press is an unqualified good. In short, with reference to
modern constitutions, we conduct ourselves in much the same way that
a person does with reference to taxes: we pay the taxes while
demanding that they be reduced, we obey the constitutions while
demanding that they undergo amendment. This effectively disposes of
the difficulties urged against us on that score; the liberal Catholics are
quite well aware of it.

To expect more of us is to expect too much; if we are supposed to pay
taxes without ever being allowed to complain of their being too heavy; if
we are supposed to transfer to modern civil constitutions our religious
faith, so that we may not question their excellence without running
afoul of what are virtually dogmatic definitions; if we are not allowed to
look forward to any amendment of them except in the form of a yet
more drastic elimination of the whole Christian idea, then what sort of
liberty have we in prospect, and what advantage can liberal Catholics
expect to reap from that liberty, which will be meted out to them in the
same measure as to us?

They willingly swear by the principles of the French Revolution; they
call them the immortal principles. It is the shibboleth39 which gives
entrance to the camp of great Liberalism. But there is a special manner
of pronouncing it, and our Catholics are not quite equal to it; hence, in
spite of everything, they are coldly received; even the more progressive
among them are kept in quarantine. 4° I congratulate them on it. In

39 Judges, 12:6.

4° Said Louis Cardinal Billot, commenting on this paragraph of Veuillot’s
L’illusion liberate: “For our dispute is not upon the question of whether it
would not be well to bear patiently what escapes our control, but of
whether we ought positively to approve of that social condition which
Liberalism introduces, to celebrate with encomiums the liberalistic
principles that are at the bottom of this order of things, and by word,
teaching and deed, to promote the same, as do those who along with the
name Catholic lay claim to the surname Liberal. And they above all are the
very ones who will never succeed at all, because they are lame on both feet,
and attempting in vain to hit on some compromise, they are neither
acknowledged by the children of God as genuine nor accepted by the
children of the Revolution as sincere. They come, indeed, to the camp of
the latter with the password of the principles of ’89, but, because they
pronounce it badly, they are denied entrance.

“We read in the Book of Judges (12:5-6) that when the ‘Galaadites, in

42

Louis Veuillot

order to have the proper accent, one must first have the proper
understanding of the thing itself and accept it in its proper sense.

If they once understood the thing, they would never, I venture to say,
accept it.

XXXIII

To what do such designations as the “principles” or the “conquests”
or the “ideas” of the French Revolution refer? These are three different
names already giving expression to as many shades of opinion, or better
still, to as many different doctrines on the subject, and there are quite a
few others besides. Such and such a Catholic liberal is at pains to draw a
distinction between the principles and the conquests, another accepts
both the conquests and the principles, a third rejects the conquests and
principles alike, and admits only the ideas.

As for the pure liberals, that is to say, liberals without any admixture
of Christianity, they detest these distinctions, which they invidiously
brand as “Jesuitical.” Ideas, principles, conquests, all are articles of
faith, dogmas, and lumped together they constitute a creed. But nobody
ever recites this creed, and if anyone has written it out whole and entire
for his private edification, one may safely defy him to reformulate it

their conflict with the Ephraimites, had overcome the latter, they
conspired to let no fugitive of Ephraim escape. And the Galaadites secured
the fords of the Jordan. And when one of the number of Ephraim came
thither in flight, and said: I beseech you, let me pass: the Galaadites said to
him: Art thou not an Ephraimite? If he said, I am not: they asked him: Say
then, Shibboleth, which is interpreted, an ear of corn. But he answered:
Sibboleth, not being able to express an ear of corn by the same letter. Then
presently they took and killed him in the very passage of the Jordan.’ And
thus, too, it happens at the gate of entrance to the camp of Liberalism. To
those who desire to enter it is said: Say then, Shibboleth, which is
interpreted the secularization of society. It is all-important, however,
whether their pronunciation is good or bad. Now, liberal Catholics suffer
from a defect of the tongue in this respect, and they are unable to
enunciate the sacramental word in the proper manner. Hence, they are not
admitted, and they have merit neither with God nor with men because
they verily in themselves the dualism whereof the Scripture speaks: ‘One
building up and one pulling down, what profit hath he but labor? One
praying and one cursing, whose voice will God hear?’ (Ecclesiasticus,
34:28-29).” (From the appendix of Cardinal Billot’s De Ecclesia.)

43

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

without making any alteration, above all one is safe in defying him to
find a single one of his brethren in 1789 that did not propose certain
suppressions and additions.

Nothing could be more tiresome or fruitless than a voyage of
exploration into the principles of the French Revolution. One finds
there an abundance of empty verbiage, of banalities and meaningless
phrases. M. Cousin, who undertook the task of throwing light on the
mysteries bearing the redoubtable and hallowed name of the principles
of the French Revolution, reduces them to three: “National sovereignty
— the emancipation of the individual, or justice — the progressive
diminution of ignorance, misery and vice, or civil charity.” Tocqueville
does not contradict M. Cousin; he merely proceeds to demonstrate,
without the slightest trouble, that the Revolution did not originate any
of these nor any other good or acceptable thing conventionally credited
to it. All of it existed better, in a mature form, in the old French
constitution, and the development thereof would have been more
general and solid, had the Revolution not put its hand, or rather its
knife, to the task.

Before 1789, France believed herself to be a sovereign nation, and,
long before that, one catches glimpses of equality before the law as the
natural consequence of the still more ancient practice of equality before
God. Charity gave proof of its existence in the enormous number of
charitable institutions and congregations; public education was more
liberal, sound and widespread than it is today.41 It is certain, too, that
the Catholic religion has never had the name of being an enemy of
courts of law, of hospitals, or of colleges. When we fought against the
monopolistic university, it was in order to open schools and to found
universities; when we fought for the liberty of doing works of religious
zeal, it was in order that no unfortunate might be left to suffer; we never
asked that any right be violated, nor that a single crime should go
unpunished out of consideration for the criminal’s rank.

If, then, the principles of the Revolution are what M. Cousin says
they are, wherein do they clash with the Catholic faith? Liberal and non-
liberal Catholics alike have consistently practiced and defended them.

XXXIV

But it is high time to uncover the secret of 1789, and to find out at
what point the liberal Catholic faith will have to cease and become
either revolutionary or Catholic. There exists one principle of 1789
which is the Revolutionary principle par excellence. No one is a

41 Report of M. de Salvandy, Minister of Public Instruction. (Note ofL. Veuillot.)

44

Louis Veuillot

revolutionary until the moment that he admits it; no one ceases to be a
revolutionary until the moment that he abjures it; in one sense or
another, it covers everything; it raises between revolutionaries and
Catholics a wall of separation over which the liberal Catholic Pyramuses
and the revolutionary Thisbes will never make anything pass but their
fruitless sighs.

This unique principle of 1789 is what the revolutionary politeness of
the Conservatives of 1830 called the secularization of society; it is what
the revolutionary frankness of the Siecle, of the Solidaires 42 and M.
Quinet brutally calls the expulsion of the theocratic principle; it is the
breaking away from the Church, from Jesus Christ, from God, from all
acknowledgment, from all ingression and all appearance of the idea of
God in human society.

To tell the truth, the liberal Catholic principle does not have to be
pressed very much to lead that far. It arrives at this point by the same
route, the same steps, the same necessities of circumstance, the same
promptings of pride that brought the Protestant principle of private
judgment to eventual denial of the divinity of Our Lord. The Fathers of
the Reformation never set themselves the goal that their posterity has
reached by now, and one may affirm that not even the boldest among
them would have contemplated this without horror. But what they
professed to retain of dogma as being more than sufficient to induce
human reason to accept it whole and entire, their children have denied
and denied, always denied; they have laid the axe to every point at
which the dogmatic sap produced a legitimate, that is to say, a Catholic,
shoot; and, finally, after laying it to the trunk and finding that the
indefectible truth sprang up always the same and always cried out to
them that it was necessary to become a Catholic, they have said at
length: Let us pull up the last roots and cease to be Christians in order
to remain Protestants!

A like fate overtook the philosophical schools of antiquity that sought
to withstand Christianity; logic in reverse plunged them back into the
absurdities of pagan theurgy, denying all truth, making pretense of
believing every folly.

Among us, the separated philosophers go to the extreme of virtually
denying morality for the sake of the bright idea of making morality
independent of religion. Under Louis-Philippe, the University told us,
as if speaking of something beautifully simple: “From three centuries

42 A labor organization in Belgium characterized by communist and
antireligious tendencies; it specialized in demonstrations staged on
occasion of the secular funerals of its members.

45

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

back, it has been the effort of the reason of man and of societies to
operate this scission which the French Revolution definitively opened
in our customs and in our institutions.”

Alas! that would be a tragic mistake: the human mind’s great danger
is the will to be right, and, whenever it loosens the rein of obedience,
this danger becomes imminent peril. Whosoever committeth sin, is the
servant of sin. 43 This is as true of doctrinal sin as it is of material sin.

XXXV

Our liberal Catholics sense the danger of the doctrine of 1789, hence
these distinctions by which they endeavor to parry its practical
consequences, and to construct a special version of the Revolution for
themselves which will make them sufficiently revolutionary while
allowing them still to remain Catholics. But it is a question of
reconciling good and evil — a feat beyond man’s power to accomplish.

This is why they pronounce the shibboleth badly, and why the
Revolution does not open its doors to them. The Revolution is fairer to
them than they are to themselves. It detects their Catholicity, and it
does them the honor of not believing them when they try to convince it
that they are no more Catholic than people outside the Church, that
nothing will come of their Catholicity, and that they will play to
perfection their godless part in that ideal form of government without
religion and without God. . . . And who would have dreamt that M.
Dupin44 would come to unfurl the Liberal Catholic banner, after he had
boasted that his regime of 1830 was a government of no religious
profession!

But M. Dupin did make his profession, and the Revolution, which
had no confidence in him, obstinately refuses to repose confidence in
liberal Catholics. It knows what sort of applications it wants made of its
own principle, it knows that Catholics will oppose it in this to their
dying breath, that sooner or later they are bound to come to their
senses, that they will retract and that when it comes to a showdown they
will be ready to shed their blood to affirm the very thing they now make
pretense to discard.

43 John, 8:34.

44 Jacques Dupin, called Dupin the Elder, was president of the Chamber under the Monarchy of
July, Procurator General of the Court of Cassation under the Empire, member of the French
Acndcmy, and of the Academy of Moral Sciences, an eminent personage in the magistracy and in

the State, jurisconsulte ecoute . . . and a strong Gallican in questions of ecclesiastical right. This is
the man that Lonis Veuillot victoriously refutes in his Droit du Seigneur.

46

Louis Veuillot

The prophet Quinet rules out of liberal society everyone who has
received baptism and has not formally repudiated it. This gives evidence
of intelligent and accurate foresight; it shows that M. Quinet
appreciates the power of baptism and is not unaware of the
incompatibility existing between liberal society and the society of Jesus
Christ. Hence, liberal society will put the ban on baptism, and,
naturally, will do everything in its power to deprive any baptized
escaper from the catacombs of an opportunity to speak to the
renegades; for, should such a one succeed in speaking to them, the
renegades might then and there cease to be deaf. This being so, what
hope is there for the liberal Catholics? They will say that they do not
understand liberty as M. Quinet understands it. We know that quite
well, the whole world knows it well; but the whole world will tell them:
it is as M. Quinet understands it that it ought to be understood.

XXXVI

In the face of the impossible, it is superfluous to discuss the
impracticable. I do not undertake to bring home to the Liberal Catholic
Church the difficulties standing in the way of its installation. If I did, I
should seem to be outraging common sense; the contingencies it would
necessitate foreseeing, not to mention the memories it would be sure to
evoke, would cast on these pages a reflection against which the
seriousness of the subject and the sincerity of the men I am opposing
would alike protest. I shall mention only the divisions that would be
sure to break out in these emancipated churches; the conflicts that
would have to be gone through at once and ever after with the
dissenters, who would pay no more attention to excommunications than
the Government itself, and who would present petitions to have the
religious edifices turned over to themselves. Soon it would become
necessary to ask the State, as the Protestants had to do, for a civil
constitution, which would promptly set up a pontiff and regulations of
faith. Then watch the organic articles begin to multiply! Consider only
what is happening to-day in Switzerland, where the worthy and saintly
Bishop of Basel, persecuted by the Government, is yet more grievously
persecuted by a party of his own people, who are all worked up to teach
him tolerance. 45 There we have liberal Catholicism in action. Certainly,

45 Bishop Eugene Lachat, of the Congregation of the Precious Blood,
Bishop of Basel from September 28, 1868, a learned theologian, whom the
Protestants and radicals had already persecuted, end who, even after the

47

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

this is the acme of all that is most odious, revolting and ridiculous. But
in the liberal system, what remedy is there for such a situation? Either
the State, true to its own role, will not interest itself in the merits of the
quarrel, and the bishop will have either to compromise or get out, while
the faithful people fall victims to the oppression of a factious minority;
or else the State will intervene, such being its good pleasure, and it will
lay down the law like a master — a hostile master at that. Here, then,
you have a pontiff not only secular, but heretical, but atheistic. . . I
leave it to the reader’s judgment whether such an outcome would be
long deferred among us.

I will readily admit that liberal Catholicism is an error of the rich. It
could never occur to a man who had lived among the people and had
seen the difficulties with which the truth has to contend, especially to-
day, as it seeks to reach down and hold its own on levels where it stands
in crying need of every available protection, but most especially of good
example in high places. The people instinctively associate an idea of
intellectual superiority with rank, with power, with command. The
inferior will not easily allow himself to be persuaded of the necessity of
being a Christian when his superior is not such. And the superior
himself entertains a somewhat similar notion, for moral elevation in his
inferior is distasteful to him, it irritates him and soon becomes odious
in his eyes. Hence the zeal, as ardent as it is devilish and insensate, with
which so many scoundrels labor in season and out of season to destroy
religion in the souls of their subordinates. That the State should
officially cease to practice religion, should break up public worship and
desist from participating in the ceremonies, that such a thing as this
should come to be rumored and remarked: that in itself already
constitutes persecution, than which, perhaps, it would be hard to
conceive anything more dangerous. The effects might not be
immediately noticed in the cities; the rich, for a certain time, might not
be aware of them at all; but out in the country it would be a shrieking
and disastrous fact. I am saying nothing of the other consequences of
godlessness on the part of the State. I am confining myself to the effects
of example alone. Let us take into account the significance of this in a
country which has been Catholic for so many centuries, and in which,
for the first time, the shoulder-belt of the gendarme begins to be
something more sacred to the crowd than the stole of the priest.

Council, was exiled from his diocese thanks to the agitations of the “Old
Catholics.” He died in 1886, Administrator Apostolic of Tessin.

48

Louis Veuillot

XXXVII

It is only too evident that, considering the present state of the world,
liberal Catholicism has no value whatever either as a doctrine or as a
means of defending religion; that it is powerless to insure for the
Church a peace which would bring her the least advancement or glory.
It is nothing but an illusion, nothing but a piece of stubbornness — a
pose. One can predict its fate. Abandoned in the near future by
generous minds, to whom it may provide a certain outlet for sentiment,
it will go on to merge itself with the general body of heresy. The
adherents whom it drags after it may then be turned into fanatical
persecutors, in keeping with the usual inconsistency of weak intellects
obsessed with the false spirit of conciliation! Certain minds seem to be
as susceptible to error as certain constitutions to disease. Everything
that is unwholesome finds lodgment in them; they are carried away by
the very first wind and ensnared by the very first sophism; they are the
property, the booty, the chattels of the powers of darkness, and one may
define them as antiquity defined slaves, non tam viles quam nulli —
“not so much vile beings as nobodies.”

Let us undertake not so much to convince them as to set them an
example that may save them.

In harmony with faith, reason exhorts us to unite and make ourselves
strong in obedience. To whom shall we go? Liberals or not liberals,
beset with the terrible perplexities of these troublous times, we know
only one thing for a certainty: it is that no man knows anything, except
the man with whom God is for aye, the man who possesses the thought
of God.

It behooves us to lock arms around the Sovereign Pontiff, to follow
unswervingly his inspired directions, to affirm with him the truths that
alone can save our souls and the world. It behooves us to abstain from
any attempt to twist his words to our own sense: “When the Sovereign
Pontiff has proclaimed a pastoral decision, no one has the right to add
or to suppress the smallest vowel, non addere, non minuere. Whatever
he affirms, that is true forever.” 4& Any other course can but result in
dividing us further and in fatally disrupting our unity. That is the
misfortune of misfortunes. The doctrines known as liberal have riven us
apart. Before their inroad, favored only too much, alas! by a spell of
political bad humor, few as we were, we amounted, nevertheless, to
something: we formed an unbroken phalanx. We rallied in such a
phalanx whenever we chose to do so; it was no more than a pebble if

4fi Mgr. Bertreaud, Bishop of Tulle. (Note ofL. Veuillot.)

49

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

you will: that pebble had at least its compactness and its weight.
Liberalism has shattered it and reduced it to so much dust. I doubt if it
still holds its place: dispersal is not expansion. At all events, a hundred
thousand specks of dust would not furnish ammunition for a single
sling. Let us aim now at but one goal, let us work with but one mind to
attain it: let us throw ourselves wholeheartedly into obedience; it will
give us the cohesion of rock, and upon this rock, hanc petram, Truth
shall plant her victorious foot.

XXXVIII

I commenced writing these pages with a sentiment of bitterness and
anguish which I no longer feel as I bring them to a close. Not only is the
liberal illusion empty to the very bottom, its counsels, which are those
of weakness and dishonesty, disclose the ignoble mainspring of its
conduct. The false pride in which it takes refuge when it ought obey
does not suffice to cover up the obsequiousness with which it defers
when it ought to have the backbone to resist. It will not long deceive
souls that were made for true greatness. With Catholics, sincerity and
nobility of soul straighten out the crookedness of the mind. If this world
seems to hold out for us the prospect of a long period of inglorious
combats without visible victory, together with humiliations of every
sort; if we are to be laughed at, to be held up to ridicule, to be expelled
from public life; if it be required of us, in this martyrdom of contempt,
to stand the triumph of fools, the power of the perverse, and the
conceited smugness of snobs, God, in His turn, reserves for His faithful
a role whose fruitful splendor they will neither refuse nor
misunderstand. To them He commits His truth contracted and reduced
to the size of an altar candle, such as one might put in the hands of a
child, and He bids them brave all this storm; for so long as their faith
does not weaken, the living flame will not only not go out, it will not
even flicker! The Earth may begrime us with its dust, the Ocean may
spew on us its froth, we may be trampled beneath the feet of beasts let
loose upon us, but we will forge on somehow over this malignant
causeway of human history. The tiny light placed in our torn hands will
not have perished; it shall kindle for us the fire divine.

50

Louis Veuillot

XXXIX

What could be more inappropriate than discussions like these, in the
presence of the problem that agitates the world, a problem of which it
can be said that it is as vast in breadth and depth as humanity itself!

It is the existence of the Papacy that is at stake, and in this question
the existence of Christianity itself is involved. In it, the whole of
humanity, past, present and future, is concerned. The great question,
the real question is to know whence humanity comes, what it seeks,
whither it goes.

Is man the creature of God, and has God given His creature an
inalterable law in the midst of the fluctuations permitted to its liberty?
Has humanity been wrong in believing for eighteen centuries that Jesus
Christ is the living and eternal Law-giver? Has it been wrong in
believing that this God instituted a priesthood of which He is the sole,
permanent and infallible head in the person of the Pope, called on this
account the Vicar of Jesus Christ? Should humanity, which has
heretofore believed this, cease to believe it any more? Is it to abjure
Jesus Christ formally by outright denial of His divinity, or virtually by
saying that His divinity was a hoax and has deceived the world, that He
really did not found the Church, but left under that name nothing more
than a fleeting work to which He gave none but unreliable promises, of
whose failure the human mind has now become aware? Finally, what
will the religious leadership of the world be, when the Pope, dragged
from his throne, relegated to the sacristy, demoted into a subject of a
petty king who is himself the puppet of his people and their allies; when
the Vicar of Christ, impotent vicar of a God dethroned, having passed
through this succession of humiliations, will no longer be bearer of any
spiritual message that will not be despised as foolishness or punished as
a State offense; when this sacred majesty, having been mocked by the
police, will be turned by the peoples into an object of derision? And
humanity? Will it any longer have a God? And if humanity is no longer
to have a God, or if it may have all the gods it pleases and will never be
at a loss to manufacture more, then what is to become of humanity?

These are a few, but by no means all, of the questions comprised
within the vast compass of preserving the Papacy: and it is in the face of
this question that the faithful are minded to discuss the Pope’s
decisions, or to decide without consulting him, the line of action it is
proper for him to take!

Obedience, which alone can anchor us in the truth, puts into our
hands, by that same token, the repository of life. Of this treasure let us
not defraud humanity, lapsed though it be into madness. Never let us

51

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

give it up, nor ever adulterate it. In time of trial and chastisement, ours
be the word that confesses the truth, ours the word that never ceases to
knock at the door of pardon; it shall speed the day of grace.

The world is on the way to lose along with Christ all that Christ has
given it. The Revolution squanders this royal heritage, priding itself the
while on having conquered it. Its victory has led to tyranny, to contempt
of man, to the immolation of the weak for the benefit of the strong, and
all this was done in the name of liberty, of equality, of fraternity. Let us
preserve the liberty to proclaim that God alone is God, that no one else
than He is to be adored and obeyed, be the masters who they may that
His anger permits to stmt their hour upon the Earth. Let us preserve
the equality never to bend the knee before force, or before talent, or
before success, but only before the justice of God. Let us preserve the
fi'aternity, that true fraternity which neither exists nor ever can exist
upon Earth, unless we preserve there the paternity and royalty of
Christ.47

THE END

47 This brochure was published in 1866. Since that time, some of the
leaders of those who were then liberal Catholics have become Old
Catholics. [NOTE: At the date when Louis Veuillot drafted this note, the
sect of the Old Catholics, which was organized around Canon Dollinger, in
revolt against the decrees of the Vatican Council and excommunicated,
appeared to be still very strong and threatening and Louis Veuillot
denounces here its influence or at least complicity in the persecutions of
the Kulturkampf. It is well known that a few years later, the Kulturkampf,
despite the power of Bismarck, was defeated by the German Center led by
Windhorst and that the sect of Old Catholics went into decline.] This is a
heresy abetted by certain governments in Germany where it persecutes the
Catholics. It lines them, imprisons them, hunts down the religious, the
priests and the bishops. Everything points to the likelihood of this
persecution becoming a bloody one.

The original liberal Catholics survive in France, where the decrees of the Council, the
admonitions of the Pope and the example of Germany have disturbed and embarrassed
them exceedingly, yet have not altogether availed to reclaim them.

June 16, 1875. (Note ofL. Veuillot, added to the reprint of this brochure
in the first volume of the Third series of the Melanges.)

52

Study Outline

LESSON I

Introduction

1. What glorious title did Leo XIII bestow upon Louis Veuillot?

2. By what title is Leo XIII’s Encyclical on Liberalism known?

3. To what organization does the Pope refer when he speaks of the

“widely-spread and powerful organization” of those who style
themselves Liberals?

4. Is the Liberal principle of the absolute sovereignty of the people

compatible with the sovereignty of God?

5. Is the Masonic principle of the separation of Church and State a

sound principle?

6. What kind of liberty did the paganizing Humanists of the XVth

century seek to revive?

7. On what ground did Luther reconcile pagan liberty with Christian

faith?

8. Why is the Calvinist Rousseau regarded as the Father of political

Liberalism?

9. Which of his works became the bible of Freemasonry and the

French Revolution?

10. Of the three kinds of Liberalism — political, economic and

religious — which is the root-principle of the other two?

11. Who was the first Grand Master of the Grand Orient whose

slanders compassed the death of Louis XVI?

12. Why do we speak of Rousseau’s principle of perfect individualism

as a pulverizing principle?

13. Who is reputed to be the Father of economic Liberalism, and in

what words was he pilloried by Ruskin?

14. What Liberal-economist formulated the Iron Law of Wages?

15. What are the three kinds of religious Liberalism?

16. What logical application does atheistic Communism make of the

Liberal ideal of a secularized society or State?

49

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

LESSON II

Liberal Catholics (chapters i-iv)

1. Of what else is a liberal Catholic full, besides beautiful illusions?

2. Why does he style the ordinary Catholic intolerant?

3. Is toleration of all religions, regardless of their truth or falseness,

the ideal regime for a State?

4. To what sort of embarrassment do “intolerant” Catholics expose

their “liberal” brothers?

5. Does the liberal Catholic suffer from an inferiority complex, and

why do we speak of him as a flesh-potter?

6. To what evidence is his mind closed, to what is it open?

7. Is any man free from the obligation to acknowledge the truth?

LESSON III

The Ageless Church and the Modern Age (chapters v-

x)

1. Do the mass of men think with their reason or with their

feelings?

2. Is it safe for reason to attack nonsense without first enlisting the

aid of sentiment?

3. To what does treason in the matter of words ultimately lead?

4. What danger lurks in the toning down of “intolerant”

expressions and the playing up of popular ones?

5. Is modern man able to take care of himself and mature enough

to dispense with Divine direction?

6. Has the Church failed to keep pace with the times? Is she a poor

straggler in the wake of human progress?

7. Has mankind outgrown the Church?

8. Has the Holy Ghost deserted her, so that she no longer enjoys

enlightenment from on high?

9. Has God retracted His promise to be with the Church forever

and changed His mind about having a Kingdom on Earth?

10. Does the eternal and unchangeable God change with the times?

11. Is the Rock of Peter a rolling stone that can be dislodged from

its position?

12. Is it adamant or is it a plastic jelly taking any and every form

impressed upon it?

54

Study Outline

13. Has the modern age repealed the royal rights of Christ the King,

or are these inviolable and everlasting?

14. Is the universal Church of a particular time, a particular place, a

particular race, or is she of all times, all places and all races?

15. What are the royal rights of Christians as Children of God — co-

heirs with Christ the King?

16. By what twofold power should Christian society be governed

and what is the relation that ought to obtain between Church
and State?

17. Which is the superior society, the Church or the State?

18. Is the State in duty bound to protect the Church in the discharge

of her Divine mission to preach the gospel to every creature?

LESSON IV

Christian Theocracy (chapters xi-xxi)

1. Do free-thinkers grant Catholics full freedom to believe in the

infallibility of the Church?

2. What does the “tolerant” man mean by saying that the only

thing he cannot tolerate is Catholic “intolerance”?

3. When liberals threaten to persecute Catholics because of their

theocracy, to what end does the liberal Catholic make capital
of this unjust intimidation?

4. Would the common people be the losers if the Church were to

regain her moral power to coerce despots, dictators,
autocrats, tyrants?

5. What happens to human freedom when the Church’s power over

the consciences of civil rulers declines?

6. Through whom does Christ reign on Earth?

7. Have Christians, through whom Christ exercises His royal rights

to reign over all mankind, any right to renounce or abate
those rights?

8. Did God, in giving man free will, give him the license to

disregard Divine truth and the Divine commandments?

9. Has the State the right to refuse official worship to God, and

may Catholics positively approve of a godless State?

10. In what sense do Catholic upholders of Liberalism resemble the

Christian maker of idols excoriated by Tertullian ( De
Idolatria, 6)?

11. Is it worthwhile to buy Masonic friendship by surrendering the

divine rights of the Church?

55

THE LIBERAL ILLUSION

12. On what condition did the Tempter promise Christ dominion

over the whole world?

13. What did Gregory VII mean when he said of Henry IV: “The

king of nothing promises to fill Our hands”?

14. Did God respect the “right” of freedom of worship in the case of

the Jews who consecrated themselves to Beelphegor?

15. Do we have to go with the stream?

16. Has force a use as well as an abuse, or should all coercion be

abolished?

17. What choice will liberal Catholics eventually have to face?

18. Is the Church a supernatural institution and has she any reason

to fear mere numbers on the side of those opposed to her?

LESSON V

Catholic Independence (chapters xxii-xxix)

1. Which was the first great declaration of independence and how
was it simultaneously a profession of dependence upon God?

2. To which result does rebellion against God lead — to liberty or to
slavery?

3. When Antichrist asks the last Christian how he wishes to be
treated, what will his answer be?

4. When the infidel Saracen ordered St. Louis to knight him, what
reply did he receive?

5. What like reply ought we to give to godless Liberals demanding
that we venerate their godless constitutions as something sacred?

6. Is it possible for error to have equal rights with truth, for vice to
have equal rights with virtue?

LESSON VI

Catholic Liberalism a Contradiction in Terms
(chapters xxx-xxxvi)

1. Do Masonic liberals trust liberal Catholics as liberal Catholics
trust Masonic liberals?

2. Why do the concessions and compromises of liberal Catholics fail
to disarm the suspicions of orthodox liberals?

3. What principle of Liberalism raises an impassable barrier
between Catholics and Liberals?

56

Study Outline

4. Do liberal Catholics accept unreservedly such Liberal principles
as the Secularization of Society, or the Sovereignty of the People?

5. Do the Masons detect this false note in Catholic professions of
liberalism?

6. What, then, must the liberal Catholic do in order to remain
liberal?

7. What were the latter-day Protestants forced to do in order to
remain Protestants?

8. Why have liberal Catholics merit neither with God nor with men?

9. What other evil consequences flow from the principle of the
secularization of society?

LESSON VII

Conclusion (chapters xxxvii -xxxix )

1. Why does Veuillot plead with all Catholics, liberal and non-liberal,

to forget their differences and to unite in a solid phalanx around

the Holy Father?

2. What crimes docs Liberalism commit in the name of liberty,

fraternity and equality?

3. What kind of liberty, fraternity and equality should Catholics

uphold?

57